New Frontiers of Regulation: Domestic Work, Working Conditions, and the Holistic Assessment of Nonstandard Work Norms

Abstract

Domestic work has long been emblematic of informality, its capacity for legal regulation dismissed or disregarded. Yet an evolving trend of national regulatory intervention has recently shifted to the international level as domestic work has become the subject of International Labour Organization (ILO) standards: the Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and Recommendation No. 201. This Article responds to the evolution of domestic work regulation as an opportunity to assess the status of working conditions rights in the project of "nonstandard work" (NSW) regulation. The central contention is that to analyse the "mainstream" of labor law without attending to legal frameworks on NSW generates a distorted picture of the regulatory terrain and misses crucial contributions to labor law’s conceptual underpinnings and technical strategies.

The Article first contends that the recent evolution of transnational-level policy on labor regulation should be conceptualized, in part, as a struggle over the legal regulation of working conditions. To this end, Part I examines key transnational policy discourses on conditions of work emanating from the ILO (the Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1998) Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization (2008) and Global Jobs Pact (2009)), the World Bank (the "Employing Workers" dimension of the Doing Business project) and the EU (the European Employment Strategy). It is argued that the global financial crisis has prompted a reformulation of these discourses on the role of working conditions regulation. Part II of the Article examines two transnational projects of domestic work regulation: the debates on the exclusion of domestic workers from EU Pregnant Workers Directive and Working Time Directive and the ILO standard-setting on Domestic Workers. Both projects are argued to challenge policymakers and researchers to attend to the interplay of precarious work regulation and mainstream working conditions norms by adopting an holistic assessment of NSW norms.

Keywords: domestic work, human rights, informal economy, international labor law, International Labour Organization, international labor standards, maternity protection, working time, working conditions

JEL Classification: J22, K31, K33, O17, O19