People in Wisconsin can now work 7 days a week — if they want to.

Before announcing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Monday, Governor Scott Walker tended to some business at home in Wisconsin, signing the state’s budget into law on Sunday afternoon. And one provision will make it easier for factory and retail employees to work seven days straight.

Under the previous law, factory and retail employees were required to take a whole 24 hours off every seven days unless they got explicit permission from the state. Now, all employees have to do is specify in writing that they’re cool with working for a full week.

Republicans in the Badger state have been pushing for the new seven-day work week since 2014. State Senators Glenn Grothman and Mark Born, who proposed the seven-day work week legislation last year, told the Associated Press in 2014 that it was a win-win for workers and employers: workers could make an extra buck, and employers could increase production.

"It's ridiculous when people want to work extra hours why Democrats would stand in the way of that," Grothman told the Associated Press. "I don't know why some people want some people to remain poor."

Chris Reader, the director of Health and Human Resources Policy at Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce — the state’s biggest lobby and one of the early supporters of the seven day work week — said that the regulation only makes it easier for workers to waive their day of rest.

“Workers will now be in complete control of whether or not to work extra hours to earn more pay for their families,” Reader told Mashable. Reader said that the key word in the legislation is that the employee has to voluntarily waive their day of rest.

“It would be one thing if the proposal actually deleted the day-off requirement and brought Wisconsin in line with most states and the federal government, which don’t have such a requirement,” Reader says. “The reform doesn’t do that – it very specifically and purposefully protects workers by keeping the day-off requirement, and keeping the waiver process as a voluntary process.”

But some opponents of the new law — which, unsurprisingly, include labor unions in the state like Wisconsin AFL-CIO — fear that the choice for workers won’t entirely be voluntary.

“In the legislative text as it now exists, there is no protection for ensuring that such a choice is truly voluntary,” Gordon Lafer, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute told Mashable. “There is nothing — particularly in non-union workplaces, which constitute the vast majority of employers covered by this law — that prevents an employer from declaring that volunteering to waive this right is a sign of being a committed employee, or that it helps the company run efficiently, and therefore that the best hourly shifts will go to those who volunteer.”

And for opponents, it’s clear that workers in the Badger state are already at a distinct disadvantage. Walker pushed through legislation that has gutted the power of labor unions in the state, and Wisconsin is an “employment at will” state — meaning that an employer can terminate an employee at any time for any reason, so long as the reason isn’t illegal or discriminatory.

While Reader notes that employees can file a complaint with the state Department of Workforce Development if they feel they are being coerced, Lafer doesn’t think it’s so black and white.

“Basically, as long as management does not make a very explicit and clumsy threat,” Lafer says, “there is almost no end to personal and financial rewards that can be made conditional on waiving a right.”

Lafer also said that the regulation might not actually lead to more hours for workers. Instead, he said, employers could use the regulation to schedule “just-in-time” shifts (when employees have to make themselves available for shifts that they might not actually end up working depending on the demand as judged by their employer).

“It's also possible that employers will use this law to create 7-day work schedules with the same number of hours as before — particularly in retail sectors where employers have long been interested in "just in time" scheduling or scheduling that puts more employees at work for shorter shifts to cover peak hours of customer demand,” Lafer says.

And then there’s the question of how the new law will affect the economy of the beer and bratwurst-loving state. Under Walker’s tenure, the state ranked 35th in job growth, and sports a $490 million structural budget deficit for 2015-2017, according to the Wisconsin Budget Project.

Reader says that the new law will have a positive impact, arguing that companies will be able to boost their production with more workers willing to work overtime.

But not so fast, says Lafer. “It's unlikely that there are any economic benefits from this to the Wisconsin economy as a whole, and certainly not to workers as a whole.”

It remains to be seen just how the new law will impact Wisconsin workers and its economy. But one thing’s for sure: the country will be keeping a close eye on how Walker leads America’s dairyland.

Update, July 14 at 1:54 p.m.: This post was updated to correct the figure of the state's budget deficit.