A Value-Centered Approach to Decent Work

This chapter intends to propose an overarching perspective, based on a value-centered, life design-based conception of decent work, that could serve as a general framework for practitioners in their effort to elaborate and implement specific intervention methods and strategies. Highlighting the necessity to help our clients reach a decent occupational situation both from an objective and subjective viewpoint, we build on the ILO’s guidelines for the promotion of decent work and offer a review of the subjective factors involved in the human experience of working, such as meaning of work, relationships to working and work values. Finally, the limits of a narrow understanding of such a value-based approach are mentioned. In order to reconcile our clients’ aspirations and rights to attain decent and meaningful work, with our societies’ needs for fair and sustainable development, we posit that, even when working with individual subjectivity, we should strive for the promotion of ethical principles as well as foster collective responsibility and social utility