A family of decent work indexes

W e first proposed a decent work index in late 1999, when the ILO’s InFocus Programme on Socio-Economic Security was set up, and are delighted that so many others are taking up the idea as reflected in this special issue of the Review and in the ILO’s Inter-Sectoral Task Force set up to promote the idea. 1 An index is indeed a useful tool. But it can be misused and is subject to certain failings that have to be taken into account. An index consists of a set of “indicators” of some underlying phenomena. In recent years, a plethora of indexes have been presented, most notably UNDP’s Human Development Index. Often, they suffer from the lack of a theoretical model and from a tendency to consist of a “shopping list” of ad hoc “interesting” variables. It is essential that the proposed decent work index should avoid these pitfalls. An index must be based on a theoretical model and should be transparent . If the variables and formula underlying are hard to understand, there will be a suspicion that the results have been “massaged” into supporting some preconceived view. To complicate matters, any index raises problems of “weighting” of various variables and of “scaling” its components. Since there are no perfect rules for index building, all one can state with conviction is that the methodology should be transparent and replicable. In the model we set out in 1999, decent work was conceptualized as requiring basic security for all – in society, in the workplace and for individual workers. 2 We identified seven forms of security in the sphere