A victory for one is a victory for all

I am a music instructor at school of rock in Texas. Some of the schools are corporate, some are franchise. The one I'm at is franchise. There are a lot of things wrong here. For one, they start us at 15/hour. Which coming from the food industry sounded like a lot. But the average wage for music teachers is more like 30/40 an hour. They also hire a bunch of people so that they don't have to give us benefits, which happens in a lot of places. But what my post is alluding to is this.. my school offers free demo lessons to clients who are interested. So we give them a tour of the school and a free 30 minute lesson. if they sign up, we get a 25 dollar bonus in addition to our normal wage. What they failed to tell us though, is that if they don't sign up we actually don't get paid at all. When I found this out i was shocked. Not only because that means i'm working hours for free, but they definitely glossed over that part of the equation. I've brought this up to a manager and a GM. They said they agree with me that it shouldn't be like that, but the owner gets away with it because we're contractors. OK, I have no idea how being a contractor means free labor. It's frustrating. The managers offered to take me off of these demos. Which is fine, but I want to fix this for other people too. Anybody have thoughts or advice on how to change this?

Before you think this is a post for capitalist or socialist side of the world, its neither. Its more of an attemp to understand historic perspectives of how major work hour changes happened.

The reason i am posting here is because people can attempt to poke holes into this ie. prove it wrong, or add information that will be able to make this reasoning more logical and stronger. Beacuse frankly we will need a lot more info to actually structure this into something that legislators can use.

The most meaningful legislation for capping work hours to 40 hour week came at the heels of great depression. . Yes it took a horrible crisis along with severe geopolitical tensions and wars to lead to a legislation like that. However there was a fundamental point that even the government accepted when debating the legislation. That if there is a cap on work hours -

1. health public cost will be lowered
2. Better health means higher pool of high-experience individuals in expertise fields
3. More jobs will be available - increasing the number of spenders in the general population, increased consumer spending means more money for companies. This point is crucial. In the great depression, it was quite clear that without money in the hands of people, capitalism can not thrive.
4. Bad job market does not help maintain stable administration.

There were other reasons as well but i am not confident they apply to today's scenarios. Fun fact (yes call me sheldon) the initial plan was to introduce a 30 hour work week. But eventually a compromise was reached and it was locked at 40 hours. The legislation was also supported by studies alread done at GM and other companies.

There are some major changes since last time that make any law-making very difficult -

1. Increased globalization - Yes this is something that is largely regarded as a good thing worldwide. However any country when trying to introduce legislation will have to be wary of global competition. In the first half of last century, it wasn't always possible to import food for entire population from other countries.
2. Increased service industry jobs - Similar to globalization issue, It wasn't possible to outsource your firm's entire job portfolio to another country.

Introducing a legislation to limit work hours in your country without a similar legislation in another country can lead to a nervous environment. People can be very charged socially and politically in nervous environments (ironic ikr).

I dont think that it makes sense for the next few years to make 30 hour work week compulsory in every company every industry. Rather i believe there is a much easier to pass legislation. Targeting companies which meet ALL of the criteria (AND condition and not OR condition) -

1. Leaders pushing the frontiers in their industry (EU has already set criteria for this in some industries). Back in 1900s also the initial initiative was taken by leaders of the auto industry and others. It is not anti-capitalist to ask leaders of an industry to try something risky, infact most of our big achievements in last 1 century have come from this, many times govt asking leaders of industry to take an unconventional risk in order to make the world a better place.
2. Ratio of Shareholder benefits to Societal benefits = This is calculated as a Ratio of (inflation adjusted EBITDA) to (employee count adjusted with productivity CAGR of 2%). counted from 2019 (so pre-covid). Example - so lets say if from 2019 to 2023 (4 years), company A's(amazon, gogl, msft,fb etc) employee count decreased from 20k to 18k. thats a 10% decrease in employee count. but the profits doubled. so the ratio has significantly increased. we can call a threshold how much increase but this gives legislators something real to work with, but this should qualify the company for 30 hour work week policy enforced by the govt. Wait a minute, now i know what ppl will say the problem is. What if next year the company's profits fall? Here is the thing, you laid off a bunch of people. If you cant hire them back and train them within time, your management is at fault here. The enforcement should not be reversed until the above ratio falls back to 2019 levels. Let upper management figure out how to fulfill their fiduciary duties while maintaining societal duties, remember this is not something that is only being done for general population, this is in the long term good for companies as well, companies cant survive without money available with population to spend on something.

^^ ofcourse nothing will hapen this year 2024, it takes a long time to get such legislation through. But above is an example and can be applied to whatever time frame eventually this is considered in.

There are some fundamental assumptions or side topics here that we can discuss as side topics if this can be converted into a megathread (for mods to decide). Otherwise lets stick to mainly "how can we realistically achieve 30 hour work week" -

1. Companies today have their fiduciary duty to their shareholders, they have no obligation towards keeping consumer spending high. A committee of companies might look at it after several years of bad annual reports, but by then it may be too late, as bad finance not only lead to unstable company leadership for decades(so bad for CEO and Board), but also lead to spending cuts in public spending (bad healthcare and bad defenses), worse general mental health, increased crime, increased poverty related death and diseases, increased geopolitical tension, increased tension towards migrants and minorities and overall higher chances of regional wars. There will be ppl who say because of so much uncertainity about the whoel thing, why not let things just run its course and eventually this will happen. However i feel inaction is just bad action when it can lead to above atrocities.
2. Politicians aren't going to get any benefit of capping work hours. If anything an increase in public spending jobs will deter a lot of politicians. However this will have to be balanced out by sentiments of the voter population. This will be a big change.
3. There are several models of shifts for different kind of jobs. Jobs requiring 24x5 availability. Right now the common setup is 3 employees working 8 hour shifts. This doesn't include the half hour of handover which almost everyone works overtime without getting paid. For 24x7 this is actually 4 people working 10 hour shifts (still capped at 40 hours per week so 4 days a week instead of 5) with one person working additional 8 hour shift as overtime. In case of changing this to 30 hour work week as a first step. 24x5 will increase to 4 employees from current 3 and 24x7 will increase to 5 employees with overtime shifts available for remaining hours OR it could rise to 6 employees.

I like to go to the Yelp pages of the chain/corporate restaurants and retail stores in my suburban hometown and talk about how wonderful the customer service is (while also mentioning how low-quality the food is obviously shitty at these corporate joints, ofc lol), and how every single member of the staff should get raises not just for doing their jobs well, but additional annual raises to keep up with the cost of living. I make it clear that the food at these corporate chain places are typically way too processed and mediocre to come for the quality so we come for the service, but if the people performing the service are not being paid a living wage then there is no reason to continue patronizing a place when our money is not going to the employees. I try to look for the local Applebees and TGIFs etc. pages with some sort of active management responding to other comments publicly, where I can tell there is at least one person up the chain whose attention I'm getting. While none of the responses I've gotten have specifically addressed the wages, they're always some variation of them saying "We're sorry you didn't have the experience we wanted you to have" and that's nice to see.

Fighting the power one review at the time!