Short answer. Presidential Decree No. 442 is known as the Labor Code of the Philippines. By its own terms, the Code took effect six months after its promulgation, and it remains the foundational statute governing employment relationships in the country, though many of its articles have since been amended.
What the law says
This Decree shall be known as the "Labor Code of the Philippines".
Labor Code, Article 1 — Name Of The Decree. Read the full provision →
What the law says
This Code shall take effect six (6) months after its promulgation.
Labor Code, Article 2 — When The Code Took Effect. Read the full provision →
The decree's official name
The opening article of the decree fixes its own name: this Decree shall be known as the "Labor Code of the Philippines". That is the title by which it is cited and referred to throughout Philippine labor law, rather than by its decree number alone, and it is how courts, agencies, and practitioners commonly refer to it in practice, even in formal pleadings and official issuances.
A delayed effectivity, not an immediate one
The Code did not take effect the moment it was signed. Its own text specifies that this Code shall take effect six (6) months after its promulgation — a deliberate delay built into the law itself, presumably to give employers, workers, and the agencies that would administer it time to prepare before its provisions became binding on everyone covered by it, rather than imposing a wholly new labor framework overnight.
The Code has been renumbered since it was first published
The articles of the Labor Code have been administratively renumbered over the years, so the same provision is often cited under more than one number depending on the source. This does not change what the law itself says — it changes only how a given article is labeled and cross-referenced in later materials and decisions, which can make older and newer citations look inconsistent even when they refer to the identical rule.
Anyone comparing an older reference against a more recent one should check which numbering convention each source is actually using before assuming the two citations describe two entirely different provisions of the same Code.
Why the Code's foundational articles still matter
Knowing the Code's official name and its effectivity mechanism matters for anyone trying to trace how a particular labor provision came to be law, or when to look at the Code's original text versus later amendments. The Code has been the base statute for employment relationships in the Philippines since it took effect, even as many of its individual articles have been amended or superseded over time by later special laws addressing specific labor issues as they arose over the decades since.