Vulnerable Workers

The 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) finds more workers in precarious conditions than at the time of its signing, largely because of fundamental changes in an increasingly integrated, liberalized economy that has transformed the Fordist international division of labour. In this essay, the authors offer a framework for thinking about workers in precarious conditions in both North and South by exploring the conditions of domestic workers around the world and matching these against the standards for decent work developed by the ILO, which in our view gives meaning to the dignity clauses of the UDHR. The paper considers what a human dignity based decent work framework can offer that the traditional emphasis on rights has missed. In the authors' view, certain elements of the framework of human dignity are useful for exploring questions of inclusion, but also issues of process and outcomes in promoting rights. Thus how rights are delivered to particular social groups can be assessed on the basis of whether it preserves the dignity of persons by respecting their agency and self determination, or whether it reduces them to supplicants or infantilizes them, thus depriving them of dignity