Sounds incredible. What book is this?

I have worked in construction, landscaping, electronics repair, IT, customer service, retail, food service, and I’m in assembly of and testing of robotics now. Not in a single instance of any of those jobs have I ever felt that I needed to work nearly as hard or as often as I do, were we adequately staffed, and properly compensated. You’re extrapolating the chronic understaffing of the current times to this hypothetical I have posited. If your boss has to pay you 3x overtime for every minute you work over 4hrs, do you think he’s going to make you work doubles, or hire more people? Why wouldn’t that be possible otherwise.

Edit: If you’re one of the owners of a collectively owned coffee shop, and you decide to work more hours because you want more money, why would that be negative? You all benefit, you all gain increased payout from increased revenue. If you have a kid, why would you choose that over your kid when you have enough money to live already?

Why does your conception of third places only include commercial entities? Why wouldn’t a society with a sudden glut of free time be incentivized to create places in which they can exist without continual and perpetual consumption? Even if consumption is your goal, I don’t see why it needs to be done through and in commercial areas. I Can currently go to city park with beer and drink it in peace, legally, without ever requiring anyone to “service” me, and without incurring any additional costs for existing in that area. Third spaces should not be primarily consumption places, they should be community spaces.

You also ignore that this points out that the productivity for such work schedules is already here. The reason the barista makes a shitty minimum wage is because 90+% of all of the value she generates is being leeched by a parasite class, who do not produce anything. If productivity gains had been redistributed as wage gains for the workers, we would already be working less hours. Including that barista. Min wage is trash because the powers that he want it to be, and not enough people fight it for it to be anything else. A minimum wage tied directly to cost of living (and thriving, not living in abject poverty), would mean that that worker would have enough funds saved up to say FUCK YOU to her boss if they tried to make her work a double, because part of a living wage is having enough saved up to cover you in the event you need to quit working for whatever reason. Not to mention that removing many of the entirely pointless levels of middle management who’s only job is to make their boss look good, or to oppress the employees they’re hired to “manage”, suddenly massive amounts of capital would be freed up from almost every corporation on the planet that could go towards the actual workers, such as those baristas.

With significantly more capital and free time, you would be able to develop and manage your own projects outside of the workplace, allowing you to continue developing yourself, your skills, and your contributions to your field. If you prefer to put the majority of your efforts into a single project or workplace, incentive structures could be developed to acknowledge your outsized contributions while not imposing such as necessary for everyone.

I think you have a great question though, and things like that would best be answered collectively, through discussion and experimentation.

What do you think? What would you prefer? What would be fair to you to recognize your extra efforts? What checks and balances would be needed to have a 16hr week as the basis for a livable wage, while still allowing for people to work more when desired?