Chinese workers work between 10 and 12 hours per day and their accommodation and food costs are often deducted directly from their wages.

There are many elderly people who would agree with that, as would those who had worked for hours for low wages which do not provide a decent living – farm labourers, for example.

Article 4(4) of the Law of 20 December 2002 regulating the working hours of workers, apprentices and trainees in the hotels and catering sector stipulates that "an employer who makes an employee work for more than 48 hours over a 7 day period calculated as the average of the reference period must have obtained the employee's prior consent.

It currently suffers from certain handicaps, particularly when compared to competition from Japan: - lower productivity: it takes an average of 35 hours to produce a mass- produced car in Europe, compared with less than 17 hours in Japan; - although expenditure on research and technological development (RTD) (in 1990: ECU 6 billion by vehicle makers and ECU 4 billion by equipment producers) is comparable to that in Japan and the United States, European industry displays a lack of ability to translate RTD activities into innovative products and/or processes, and these into shares of the market; - the workforce in the European motor vehi ...[+++]cle industry has a significantly lower level of basic education and skills than its Japanese counterpart; moreover, the average age in the European industry is 45 years, compared to just 28 years in Japanese transplants in Europe and about 35 years in Japan.

In a little more than a century, the time worked by an urban worker in the industrialised countries has fallen from something like 4 000 hours per year (with no evenings off, no weekends, no holiday, no retirement) to more like 1 600 hours, with free time now accounting for more than working time.