Ireland is a great example of bare minimum employee law to meet EU standards, and light touch regulation that needs to be bailed out by 35½ hr-a-week France.
And they themselves find it depressing which they accepted in the interviews.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/euro...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763618,00....
Just so you know the underlying theme at France and Greece. Intellectual people in France know that their number of work days are not sustainable but as of now if government tries to make a change, they will not survive the election because people have taken these holidays as their right. So they cannot make the change even if they want to.
Greece has the similar socialism problem of big government, high government salaries and unrestrained spending no doubt they have high unemployment.
We are headed in that direction under current administration where government is growing without bounds and we have unemployment rate of almost 9%.