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2. Working time in domestic work: Regulatory 
dimensions 
This section first identifies the working time arrangements that characterize domestic 
work. The objective is to highlight the problems that these arrangements can present for 
domestic workers, and which legal frameworks could therefore convincingly be designed 
to address. A broader analysis is then conducted of the nature of domestic work and the 
workers who engage in it, as relevant to the legal regulation of this form of work. This 
analysis highlights the diversity of domestic work and draws out certain of the key 
variables that influence this diversity. 
2.1 Working time arrangements and contemporary 
regulation 
The first step in identifying the regulatory dimensions of contemporary domestic 
work is to address the concerns about the working time arrangements that exist in this 
segment of the labour market. Drawing on the available (albeit rather limited) research on 
the nature of domestic work in contemporary economies highlighted in the ILO report 
(2009) on 
Decent Work for Domestic Workers
, the following issues can be singled out as 
the key concerns: 

long or completely open-ended hours (daily, weekly, annual) and/or insufficient 
rest periods across the same timeframes; 

―unsociable‖/undesirable/unsafe hours (for example, night work, work on 
weekends and public holidays), recognizing that young people and women are 
particularly vulnerable to requirements to travel home or return to work late at 
night; 

long spans of hours/split shifts (in which the domestic worker performs his or her 
daily hours in fragmented time periods); 

excessively short hours and the related low income; 

predictability of scheduling (daily, weekly, annual); 

limited access to the rewards of ―life-course‖ working time (for example, 
discrimination against domestic workers in national retirement schemes; exclusion 
from paid annual leave schemes); 

limited access to sick leave; 

long or unpredictable periods of ―on-call‖ or ―standby‖ duty, and difficulties in 
determining how these periods should be measured; 

long- and/or short-term uncertainty about total hours, and hence income insecurity; 

lack of influence over working time arrangements, whether collective or 
individual; 

limited capacity to respond to family emergencies; 

lack of awareness of legal and collective rights on working time and the individual 
worker‘s own contractual arrangements; 

inadequate documentation and verification of hours actually worked; 

lack of access to mechanisms for democratic participation in and control over 
workplace issues and to legally mandated consultation over working time at 
workplace, sector and national levels; 

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Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 27 

problems in implementation of legal measures. 
Despite the range of dimensions of domestic work that could potentially be addressed 
by legal measures, presently many labour law regimes conceptualize domestic work as