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The unity of working time law
. It is evident that domestic work, including in its 
working time dimensions, must be embraced by labour law regimes. Such regulatory 
reform, however, must be embarked on in an awareness of the significance of domestic 
work for the evolution of working time laws and, in particular, with a concern that legal 
measures on domestic work do not undermine the standard of protection available under 
mainstream working time laws. This is a question, then, of the coherence of regulatory 
regimes on working time, and implies that models of working time regulation are most 
convincingly conceptualized as an integrated whole. 
2
On the regulation of temporary agency work, see Vosko, 2000; McCann, 2008. 

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Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 27 
15 
Regulated flexibility and “working time capability”
. The working hours that 
characterize domestic work in part fuel its displacement from labour law regimes by 
diverging from the standard model of working time. For this reason, domestic workers do 
not benefit from the protections afforded by working time law regimes. In response, the 
principal benefits of the standard model (certainty, regularity, the preservation of social 
and community time) must be retained in the working time models devised for domestic 
work. The project of regulating this sector, then, will inevitably entail a degree of 
―standardization‖ of working hours, to align them with traditional frameworks of working 
time protection and thereby derive the benefits offered by this model
 
(Bosch, 2006). This 
―standardization‖ is centred on both the duration and predictability dimensions of its 
working time arrangements, and requires curbing long and unsocial hours and ensuring 
certainty for domestic workers in the scheduling of their working hours. 
Certain forms of domestic work, however, and in particular those that involve 
elements of personal care, must inevitably escape the strictures of standardized working 
time, at least periodically
.
The challenge for the regulation of domestic work is to ensure 
compatible flexibilities: the employer‘s need for the presence of the domestic worker in 
urgent circumstances and the worker‘s ability to address unexpected elements of his or her 
family life and other responsibilities. A solution can be found by drawing on Bosch‘s 
(2004) ―flexible SER‖ approach, in his call to make the standard-form flexible where 
necessary while retaining its protective elements. This approach is also supported by the 
notion of ―working time capabilities‖ as it has been developed in the arena of working time 
to suggest policies to support the capacity of individual workers to influence their working 
hours (Lee and McCann, 2008). This divergence, or ―flexibility‖, is foreseen in regulatory 
models in a range of caring professions and is reflected in the ―framed flexibility‖ model 
for domestic work outlined in the following section.