In my experience, better workers rights tend to make your life better regardless of whether you work your arse off or not.

In fact, I would say that setting in place systems that push employees to work unsociably heavily and forsake family and life experience in order to be rewarded is a staple of countries with extremely toxic working cultures, such as japan and china.

Employers in countries with good workers rights tend to react mostly with abject terror if they discover you've been, say, working weekends. They know what happens if the government or local unions get wind that unpaid weekend work might be some kind of defacto standard in a workplace.