In France employees can now legally ignore calls and e-mails from boss

What's their productivity like? Must be circling the drain.

I will look it up but I believe that they are closer to that of Germany than that of Greece.

Although I can absolutely agree with the sentiment behind the law, I just can't see this being practical or good for their competitiveness.

I'm not sure but maybe, just maybe, having your employees on the hook for 24/7 lowers their total output, productivity, etc. Sometimes your brain has to "go away and change the subject" or you become increasingly zombie-like. It's that old Inner Calvinist telling us to work from dawn to dust and beyond but it might just be an illusion that we are accomplishing more and better things.

I've taken a look at the OECD:

"Unit labour costs and labour productivity (employment based), Total economy"
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ULC_EEQ

... who record this data on a quarterly basis. Canada lead France slightly in productivity for half of 2013 and they passed us. Interestingly, The United States was behind both of us and France lead them for three quarters and the U,K, is pretty stagnant, as well. The French and Germans are substantially apart from each other and not much of the World can catch the Germans. The real sick man of Europe is Italy, not France.

Our culture has a hard time accepting the ethereal notion that the quality of our lives has monetary value but it could be that the French are actually way ahead of us.