I don't know how or why it has become 42, it just is. Mainly for medical professions it's even higher. We swiss have a bit of a strange relationship with work hours and holidays, when we had to vote on 6 weeks of holiday instead of 5 it was of course voted down... A lot of companies are still very old school so I don't have high hopes of getting any of the new experimental 6h workdays to try out here.