> In a market in which two companies are competitors, and one takes the former approach and one takes the latter, which company do you think will still be around in ten or twenty years?

That is an argument of faith (that companies where employees work longer survive more than companies that optimise differently), and I am not convinced it is supported by evidence.

One could argue that all other things being equal, companies with employees doing more hours are more productive (even though I seriously doubt that, there are diminishing returns very quickly). But then I would argue that if a company drives their employees harder, there are leadership and management issues, so other things are not equal. And this is associated with younger workers (adaptable: good, inexperienced: less good), high turn-over (so, long-term information retention issues) and lower worker satisfaction (so the whole thing is self-defeating in the long term).

Besides, there are many, many factors involved that have nothing to with with working time. Again, leadership, strategy, operations, marketing, personal connections, dumb luck…

Personally I think there is an optimum somewhere, and at some point you get more out of your workers by making them more invested and motivated than making them work longer.

This isn't entirely true, or we'd all still be working 80hrs like factory workers at the start of the industrial revolution.

I think it also remains to be proven that the company that works their employees the hardest will necessarily outcompete the others.

The answer is obviously that an overseer (i.e. the state) must enforce a floor to avoid a race to the bottom, because that argument implies then why not work 14 hours, 6 days a week. Like safety laws enforcing a common standard so companies are not out-competed by ditching safety measures, labour laws are also part of keeping the playing field fair in an competition economy.

Yet after 100 years of explosive technological growth we still have the labouring hours of the 1930s...