Contributions of psychology to rethinking the decent work concept

Abstract

Decent work is a generic and universalizing concept based on social and economic factors proposed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Thus, this study aimed to rethink the concept of decent work through the potential contributions from international and Brazilian psychology, as a global South example. Studies on decent work were extracted from Brazilian (Pepsic, Scielo, BVS-Psi, Banco de teses USP, IBICT, and CAPES) and international (Scopus, PsycINFO, Proquest, and Redalyc) electronic databases, and were organized and analyzed in an exploratory and descriptive fashion. The main results showed that decent work is still characterized as an emerging theme for the field of psychology. Thus, psychology could contribute to this general field of studies by offering a psychosocial and contextualized decent work view. In this view, the concept of decent work should contain universal elements, but these elements should be relativized as a function of the context in which work happens.

Keywords

• informal work
• working conditions
• work organization