Of course it's different to sell yourself into slavery, but it still asks the question: are you in favour of "the freedom for individual workers to contract as

Of course it's different to sell yourself into slavery, but it still asks the question: are you in favour of "the freedom for individual workers to contract as they see fit", or are you not? I'd say that the qualitative difference between longer and longer work weeks ("freely contracted", as you might say) and slavery tends to zero. The fact that you need to work 60 hours a week to get you and your family ahead is precisely the problem that the law is trying to solve - and any social law, for that matter. It's a worker's rights law, set amidst late capitalism in a modern "democratic" country, as such it will target two things: allowing employers to keep employing people (but not excessively) and allowing employees to survive (but not "for nothing"). This is the goal of any capitalist mode of organisation, and this is but a tug of the rope in favour of labour rather than capital, but capitalism is characterised by the endless tug here and there between capital and labour.