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“External” on-call
work
. On-call time spent outside of the workplace is not 
captured by the definition of working time unless the domestic worker is subject to 

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Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 27 
a degree of obligation comparable to internal on-call periods. Instead, these 
periods are regulated through the imposition of hours limits and a requirement for 
compensation. A domestic worker can only be required to be on-call on an external 
basis for a period of no more than three days, to a maximum of five times a month 
and 50 times a year. These periods attract an ―on-call allowance‖ of at least 25 per 
cent of the ordinary wage, and, where the worker is called-out, he or she must be 
remunerated at a premium rate. 

“Live-in” workers
. To prevent the exploitation of the particularly vulnerable 
category of ―live-in‖ domestic workers, all of their periods of on-call duty are 
classified as internal.
6.2.2 Working time adjustments 
The second element of the flexibility standards is inspired by the recent regulatory 
trend towards permitting individual workers to influence the duration and scheduling of 
their working hours. These ―individual choice‖ measures have been prominent in the 
Netherlands and Germany, and more recently extended to the United Kingdom, Australia 
and New Zealand (see, for example, Lee and McCann, 2006). Grounded in the universality 
principle outlined in Section 4, this element of the Model Law is intended to permit a 
group of vulnerable workers to share in a regulatory advance of mainstream working time 
law. To this end, the Model Law extends two central entitlements to domestic workers. 

Planned adjustments to working hours
. An obligation is placed on the employer 
when making substantial changes in a domestic worker‘s hours to inform the 
worker and discuss options for implementing these changes. The preferences of 
the domestic worker must be taken into account. 
