The right to be lazy?

German union leaders are calling for siestas. The DGB confederation of trade unions argues that a short, lunchtime nap makes sense for health and performance reasons.

Annelie Buntenbach, a DGB executive board member, said "A short afternoon nap reduces the risk of, for example, a heart attack, and provides an energy boost."

Studies bear this out. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Athens Medical School in Greece found that Greek workers who took regular siestas had 37% lower mortality rates from coronary illnesses than their napless counterparts.

"An afternoon nap bridges the power low (of midday) with its heightened risk of errors," said Jürgen Zulley, a professor of biology and psychology at the University of Regensburg. "A nap can help us to react faster, be more alert, remember things better and put us in a better mood."

A study last year at the University of California Berkeley backed that up by demonstrating that healthy young adults performed better at learning task towards the end of the day if they had taken an afternoon nap.

German companies such as BASF, Opel, Hornsbach and Lufthansa provide special rooms for their workers, and employers say they benefit from the increased productivity of well-rested employees. Germans used to take siestas up until the industrial revolution. But the labour needs of the manufacturing economies caused the custom to die out in much of northern Europe. It has been a diminishing custom in the south as well over the past two decades.