I also want to, like, specifically say that employers are not cutting hours to be jerks, employers are cutting hours because it’s not profitable to have the doors open for more hours. If you think of the problem as ‘employers jerkishly don’t want to pay employees well’ you’ll be very confused by behavior like ‘keep hours at this franchise, close this one on weekends, close this one on Wednesday afternoons’, yet those are the sort of decisions actually being made.
I think something a lot of people are ignorant of which would be helpful when it comes to a lot of these kind of conversations is the actual margins in the businesses they view as the enemy. Walmart has a 3-5 percent profit margin. Oil companies make around 6 percent. Health insurance profit margins are around 4 percent. Fast food franchises can range from near zero to over 10 percent. Thanks to the cutthroat nature of capitalism in many industries, businesses run along the very edge of existing at all. You can’t mandate any significant savings to the consumer or increased payment to employees without actually making those businesses fail.
Not unless you’re very clever about it, and most of these plans are not.