Greece enacts six-day working week

Some countries are finding that shorter work weeks result in more prosperity—perhaps with an eye on statistics that show workers tend to run out of steam after a few hours each day anyway. Greece, though, has other plans: it is instituting a six-day working week.

The change means a traditional 40-hour workweek could be extended to 48 hours per week for some businesses. Food service and tourism workers are not included in the six-day working week initiative.

The pro-business government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said the measure is both "worker-friendly" and "deeply growth-orientated." It is designed to support employees not being sufficiently compensated for overtime work and to help crack down on the problem of undeclared labor.

One of the poorest countries in the EU, the kind of place people are paid daily in cash, Greece abolishing weekends is best understood as a declaration of the sort of labor its "business-friendly" government wants to optimize for. You don't have to do much, but you do have to be doing it 48 hours a week.