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3.3 Working time flexibility 
An analysis attentive to notions of ―working time flexibility‖ is also useful in 
conceptualizing the working time of domestic workers. While a contested concept, in the 
working time arena flexibility mechanisms are understood to facilitate working hours that 
deviate from the working time component of the SER, whether at the behest of worker or 
employer (Collins, 2005; Fudge, 2005). This concept is both descriptive and normative and 
has implications for working time policy on domestic work in both forms. It can be drawn 

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on, first, to reshape the understanding of domestic work as inevitably involving long hours, 
by showing that the expectation that a domestic worker will be extensively and 
unpredictably available is an unconstrained
 
form of flexibility. A working time flexibility 
analysis, then, reveals domestic work as a sector characterized by working time 
arrangements that, rather than inevitable or ―natural‖ adjuncts of the job, reflect an 
exceptionally high degree of employer-oriented flexibility. 
Situating domestic work on a continuum of working time flexibility has implications 
for the design of regulatory models. It allows domestic work to be grouped with a range of 
comparable occupations and thereby to reconsider the assumption that it is peculiarly 
resistant to being subject to a suitable legal regime. In particular, it suggests recourse to 
models that have been designed either to couple flexibility in the interests of employers 
with protections for workers, or to integrate a degree of employee-oriented flexibility into 
regulatory models (see further Section 4).
 

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