Long shifts are pretty common in important real-world (vs. office) jobs. For instance, hospital ICU nurses:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3786347/

Table 1 (n = 5,831) shows that 80% of the ICU nurses reported that their last shift was 12-13 hours. Another 5% reported a >13 hour sift.

It's been a few years but I've known a number people who worked on the production lines at Intel's fabs in Hillsboro, Oregon. Many, if not all of them worked 3 twelve hour shifts each week. As I understand it the schedule is pretty common in production facilities of this type.

Note: I'm not commenting on the suitability of the practice, just on the fact that it's not unique to certain countries in Asia.

12 hour shifts, while highly uncommon, are legal even in some of the most developed EU countries.

Though, there's weekly hourly limits and limits on how many consecutive days you can have 12h shifts.

12+ hour shifts are the norm for nurses in the US, so apparently.

Abbott Laboratories operate 12-hour shift patterns and they are FDA regulated

12 hour shifts are pretty common in manufacturing in the US.

There's usually weekly limits

So you could do 12h shifts 3/4 days a week and/or have extra days off

It is very much normal in manufacturing and healthcare.

Elon says so.

This move doesn't make sense under a capitalistic point of view. This is geopolitics. The US protecting its interests, corporations playing along - they don't have a choice anyway.