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4. Principles for the regulation of working time 
in domestic work 
Drawing on the insights that were garnered in Section 3 from examining certain of the 
preoccupations of the contemporary working time debates, this section outlines key 
principles in which to ground the regulation of working time in domestic work. These 
principles are broad in scope and can be drawn on to shape legal regimes across a range of 
regulatory settings. They are deployed in this study to underpin the Model Law outlined in 
Section 6. 
Legal recognition of the value of care-work
. The starting point for the regulation of 
working time in domestic work is the recognition – in legal form – of the value of this 
form of labour. The need for domestic work to be recognized as valuable is an overarching 
insight applicable to all relevant legal frameworks (ILO, 2009). 
It has, however, particular implications for measures on working time. This principle 
suggests, most notably, a ―formalization‖ or ―standardization‖ of domestic labour. In the 
most fundamental sense, this formalization implies that domestic work should be subject to 
regulation rather than assigned to a realm beyond the reach of formal norms (ILO, 2009). 
A less obvious aspect of formalization is that domestic work should be recognized as 
comparable in a range of dimensions to other of the caring professions. This insight 
highlights the value of domestic labour by emphasizing its role in the care economy. It can 
be brought to bear on the quest for regulatory models, in that similar occupations regulated 
to address the dimensions of temporal flexibility encountered in domestic work: the need 
for emergency care and the impossibility of uniform adherence to working hours 
schedules. In particular, the medical, nursing and residential care professions are governed 
by regulatory frameworks that take into account the need for such temporal flexibilities 
and can be drawn on to inspire new models for the household services sector.