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Work/family reconciliation for domestic workers
. The work/family approach 
outlined in Section 3.1 implies a central role for legal intervention in working hours: to 
ensure that the private and family lives of domestic workers are not undermined in the 
drive to sustain the family life of the dominant party to the wage-work bargain. At least in 
part, the role of working time regulations should be to ensure that the work/life balance of 
the subordinate party is also preserved. This objective suggests that, for reasons that are 
both longstanding (health and safety, productivity) and of more recent provenance 
(work/family, work/life), limits on hours and rest periods should be extended to domestic 
workers. 
The project of extending working time regulation to domestic work engages the 
critical issue of the relationship between the paid work of domestic workers and the 
―ordinary‖ functions normally carried out by family members (generally women, given the 
gendered nature of unpaid domestic work in most societies). Indeed, the failure to properly 
distinguish between parental care work and paid care work compounds the undervaluation 
of domestic work in the paid employment sphere and threatens to obscure elements of the 
working lives of domestic workers that should be subject to regulatory intervention. 
To this end, it is important to re-conceptualize the nature of domestic care work so 
that it is not conflated in any simple way with the caring functions of, for example, parents. 
The underlying economic transaction through which a particular form of labour is 
purchased for particular ends is at the heart of the distinction that must be made between, 
for example, a parent changing their own child‘s nappy and a domestic worker performing 
the same task. A parent will normally undertake her domestic tasks having regard to an 
internal set of values, expectations and emotional relationships within her family group and 
beyond. The domestic worker must learn and then comply with this unspoken framework 

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Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 27 
of action in order to perform her duties in accordance with the householder‘s wishes. Her 
work involves occupational knowledge and skill. Unlike the parent who deviates from her 
intended care plans, a misstep by the domestic worker in reading the householder‘s values 
and expectations might lead to termination of the employment relationship. One domestic 
worker crystallized her experience of the complex task of managing the labour process in 
which she was engaged in the following terms: 
[I had] the right to say “yes” all the time, the right to be cheerful always [but] no right … to 
be sad or have a long face [or] be tired (Filipina domestic worker in Belgium, quoted in 
ETUC, 2005, p. 33). 
A proper conceptualization of domestic work is particularly vital to understanding 
working time and the nature of its regulation. The fact that all new parents feel exhausted 
at some stage of caring for their babies, for example, does not in any way alter the need for 
regulation to prevent the exhaustion of domestic workers who also undertake this task. 
Again, the parental experience cannot and should not be simply mapped onto that of the 
domestic worker. Seeing the domestic workers‘ tasks as a form of labour in this way 
allows us to consider the regulation of domestic work in terms of the regulation of 
comparable forms of work. It also suggests that newer techniques of work/family 
regulation are integrated into laws on domestic work (see further Section 6.2 below).