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2.2.2 Life-course and citizenship 
Domestic work also exhibits diversity, and raises a distinct set of regulatory 
challenges, when considered through the lens of the life-course and citizenship status of 
the worker. To conduct a life-course analysis, children and young adults who engage in 
domestic work are particularly vulnerable, and may need special protection with respect to 
their working time arrangements. During childbearing years, many domestic workers will 
have their own families to care for, or a wish to start a family, and working time 
arrangements may have to be adjusted to allow these workers sufficient time for caring 
obligations, including the care of elderly or ill relatives. Older workers whose entire 
professional lives have been spent undertaking domestic work may find themselves 
vulnerable to poverty and unemployment in old age. Occupational pension or 
superannuation schemes may exclude all domestic workers, exclude those who are not 
legally classified as employees, or fail to aggregate fragmented periods of domestic 
employment for the purposes of continuity of service. Indeed, all working time 
entitlements that are based on accumulated service risk disadvantaging many domestic 
workers: they are vulnerable to fragmented employment engagements (through the 
multiple client or temporary agency modes of work discussed in Section 2.2.1) or failure to 
record properly the duration of their working hours. 
Domestic workers who are also transnational or internal migrants are also subject to 
greater risks of exploitation and abuse. Language barriers and the absence of a support 
network may heighten the domestic worker‘s reliance on the employing household, 
particularly where that household is also the migrant domestic worker‘s home in the host 
country. Moreover, the legal status of migrant domestic workers can be complicated by 
their modes of employment: for example, undocumented immigrants generally exist 
beyond any of the recognized and legally sanctioned employment modes. Even those 
migrant workers who are working legally in one of the recognized forms must also be 
understood to be enmeshed in another layer of legal regulation – migration law and policy 
– that may well be derived from more than one jurisdiction. Agencies that supply migrant 
labour may similarly operate across borders and exist in both legally recognized and other 
forms. The potentially complex legal identity of the migrant, then, and the particular risks 
these workers face in the host country, raise the stakes of legal regulation for such workers 
and call for particular attention in working time laws. 

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Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 27 
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