The legal cap is 48hrs/week, max 10hrs/d. Parental leave is 12-14 months and you get around 67% of your average net income. When you look at vacation you have to take public holidays into account and that differs a lot between the states within Germany. Germany has 5 public holidays (which don't fall on a Saturday or Sunday), the USA for example has 9 public holidays this year. The benefits are largely the result of workers unions. Most benefits were given to prevent a rise of communism. The result were high work standards. But those high standards only apply to some industries which are in decline and some of them have almost disappeared (steel for example). Germany is almost certainly not the worst place to be a worker. The problem is that Germany is a gerontocracy. Only the elderly part of the workforce fully benefits from them. 30 days paid leave with 38-39hrs/week were normal a few decades ago. Nowadays one should not expect to get more than the bare minimum. In a lot of industries workarounds have become the norm. For example workers in slaughterhouses are hired as contractors so work standards don't need to be applied. The main issue I have is that the German economy and the idea of the social welfare state is on shaky feet. The baby boomer will retire within the next decade but the German welfare state is based on a pyramid scheme which will collapse soon. So Germany is a bad place to be worker in that sense that you need to take a gigantic bet on the continuation of a system which is designated to fail on the long run.