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6.2.1 On-call work 
Among the most pressing questions for regulatory frameworks on domestic work is 
how to address periods in which workers must remain ―on-call‖ or ―standby‖, during 
which they are not required to carry out their primary tasks but to be ready to return to duty 
as and when they are required by the employer. As the unpredictability in working hours 
highlighted in Section 2.1 suggests, the nature of domestic work implies that employees 
may be called upon at short notice to perform tasks for which it is difficult or impossible to 
plan in advance. The conceptualization of such hours spent on-call, however, is not well-
developed in labour law regimes, which tend to embody a strictly bilinear conception of 
time as either ―working hours‖ or ―rest periods‖.
35
Thus Supiot has singled out a ―third‖ 
kind of ―on-call time‖ that is neither clearly working time nor rest, and notes that its 
34
It is assumed that maternity leave is covered as part of a separate legislative scheme on maternity 
protection. 
35
This classification is most prominent in the EU Working Time Directive, which defines ―rest 
periods‖ simply as periods that are not working time. 

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―classification and legal regime have yet to be defined in labour law‖ (Supiot, 1999, p. 81; 
see also Mundlak, 2005). 
The regulation of on-call work has, in some settings, been paired with a conception of 
the objectives of working time regulation that ties regulation to productivity, by 
characterizing working hours as amenable to regulation only when they are fully 
productive. Working time and wage laws have always deployed the notion of ―working 
time‖ as a proxy for productivity (Supiot, 1999); the ―productivity regulation‖ model 
instead precludes periods designated as inactive from the legal notion of working time, and 
therefore from the parameters of regulated work. This model has, albeit implicitly, been 
injected into legal discourses on working time in recent years, where it has been advanced 
to designate periods of work as either productive or non-productive. This classificatory 
system has been applied in particular to occupations, most notably in the health sector, that 
skirt the binary divide found in working time laws between ―working time‖ and ―rest‖ by 
involving periods in which the employee is ―on-call‖ or ―standby‖ rather than engaging in 
the productive components of his or her job. The productivity regulation model consigns 
working time regulation solely to the realm of paid work, and is therefore in stark contrast 
to the alternative work-family/work-life models. The latter, by conceptualizing paid labour 
as ―time out of life‖, ground the regulation of working hours in the demands of the periods 
conventionally designated as ―rest‖ (McCann, 2004). 
Productivity has a long-standing presence in the field of domestic work regulation: 
the characterization of domestic work as unproductive in its entirety is a well-documented 
driver of its history of legislated exclusion (Cancedda, 2001). While the international 
standard-setting exercise confirms the fading influence of this image of domestic labour, 
its legacy can be traced in certain of the models designed as part of recent efforts to 
regulate domestic work, which differentiate periods of ―inactivity‖ from productive hours. 
Complicating this picture is a regulatory technique, apparently of relatively recent 
origin, which bifurcates working hours into what have been characterized as ―active‖ and 
―inactive‖ periods.
36
This activity/inactivity distinction has been most prominent in the 
recent unsuccessful efforts to revise the EU Working Time Directive, in which it was 
proposed to permit the extension of hours limits in jobs that involve substantial periods of 
―inactivity‖ (European Commission, 2005). This classification has also been mapped onto 
domestic work in certain of the regulatory models generated by efforts to formalize the 
sector. The French collective agreement on domestic work (