[gearhart]

Your company giving you the option to auto-delete holiday emails and the government enforcing a 40 hour work week are very different things. The Daimler approach gives a socially-acceptable option for people who want absolute downtime, which most people seem to agree is a good thing; your proposed law would remove people's opportunity to work harder and in a more concentrated fashion to give themselves other options.

Your valuable time may be evenings and weekends with your family, mine may be being able to take a year out to travel or (although many European countries certainly don't seem to appreciate this), I may actually enjoy my job! In those instances, working a 70 hour work week may actually be what I want to do.

There's nothing stopping you having a corporate culture that encourages 40 hour working weeks, and if that's what works for you then by all means, find an employer who will respect that, but you can't expect everybody to be forced to follow that lifestyle, and you can't expect an employer not to take it into consideration when they decide who they want to hire.