It's the same distinction between part time and full time work, a lot of things kick in when you work more than 35-40 hours for a company. It's not about limiting people's time it's about making sure companies don't take advantage of people. You can make a similar argument about all labor regulations, eg why limit people to 40 hours if they're willing to work more for the same pay if their employer doesn't want to pay overtime?

> You can make a similar argument about all labor regulations, eg why limit people to 40 hours if they're willing to work more for the same pay if their employer doesn't want to pay overtime?

Which is why all such regulations are ridiculous. You "help" someone by requiring higher pay for overtime, the employer responds by prohibiting overtime. The worker still wants more than 40 hours, so they take a second job, still don't get any overtime, but now they have the expense of a second commute and get paid less because the second job has to duplicate all of the employment benefits the first job was already providing instead of paying that money as wages.

There's no voluntary out for overtime because companies usually demanded that employees worked those longer hours and employees then and now had very little protection against retaliation if they didn't want to.

A lot of the 'employee choice' arguments depend on an illusion of free association when the employer has almost all the power to set work conditions and can let the employee go at will with no compensation.

> A lot of the 'employee choice' arguments depend on an illusion of free association when the employer has almost all the power to set work conditions and can let the employee go at will with no compensation.

The "illusion" existed at a time when there were company towns and a Big Three automaker cartel and you really couldn't just go work for somebody else. It's a pretty outdated argument when if you don't like working for Walmart you can realistically just go across the street and take a job at Target.

There are maybe some jobs that are that fungible (even then I'd love to see numbers on time between jobs on any industry) but for better jobs that aren't paying minimum wage the threat of losing your job is real and the gap before getting a similarly paying job is real and threatening to a lot of people.

Even in low paying 'fungible' jobs the threat of losing your job and the gap between one minimum wage job and the next stops all sorts of laws from being properly enforced because employees can't afford to lose their job in retaliation while waiting for a payout. Take basic wage theft one of the largest loses of money for people in the US every year totaling possibly billions of dollars. Companies are paying below minimum wage, refusing to pay over time, requiring off clock time, etc and employees feel like they can't come forward because they can't afford any interruption in their wages because of a number of things but chief among them is if you're living paycheck to paycheck even missing one week's wages can put you in a debt spiral.

When companies are about to pull this off I find it hard to believe that things like overtime protections and hourly limits are 'limits on choice' more than they're protections against abuse.

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro... - just minimum wage violations

https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft

> but for better jobs that aren't paying minimum wage the threat of losing your job is real and the gap before getting a similarly paying job is real and threatening to a lot of people.

But for better jobs that aren't paying minimum wage, the rules don't really change anything. Most of the better jobs pay salary instead of hourly anyway, and even for the ones that don't, if you're making non-trivially more than minimum wage then you can negotiate around the restriction anyway.

Averaging $25/hour because you worked 80 hours at $25/hour is the same result as having a base pay of $20 and working 40 hours of overtime at $30. So if you were getting paid $25/hour and want more hours, you can offer to work for $20/hour, get the extra hours and still average $25, i.e. in practice you can waive the overtime premium because doing so doesn't put you under the minimum wage.

> Companies are paying below minimum wage, refusing to pay over time, requiring off clock time, etc and employees feel like they can't come forward because they can't afford any interruption in their wages because of a number of things but chief among them is if you're living paycheck to paycheck even missing one week's wages can put you in a debt spiral.

These are really just unlawful methods of avoiding the negative effects of the prohibition on choice.

There exist employers who don't do those things, so why don't those people quit and work there instead? Because their existing job has some countervailing benefit. Maybe it's less of a commute, or has more flexible hours, or the alternative job is higher stress or more dangerous. It's not legal to have you work 50 hours and pay you for 40, but when the alternative is that you lose the job because it can't actually command that hourly wage, prohibiting that choice (or the equivalent one where you get paid for all your hours but at a lower hourly wage) isn't actually helping. Because then you get stuck with the alternative where you work for 40 hours and get paid for 40 hours but spend 12 extra hours a week commuting, which might be legal but does nothing for you than to cost you an extra two hours a week and $150/month in fuel.

> companies usually demanded that employees worked those longer hours

When the 41st hour costs as much as the 39th, yes. When it cost more, one hires more people. Or a temp agency.

> Which is why all such regulations are ridiculous.

Most of those regulations were written in blood, toil, and tears - they deserve more respect than that. You are correct - regulations often limit an individual's ability to maximize their own gains in order to lift the overall floor. If you want to maximize your income, start a private car service and build your own clientele like an actual independent operator.

Alternatively, we could offer public healthcare, social housing, and food guarantees, decoupling work from survival. Then the regulations would be ridiculous.

> You are correct - regulations often limit an individual's ability to maximize their own gains in order to lift the overall floor.

The problem is they regularly fail to lift the overall floor. Prohibiting your existing best available source of employment will, as a rule, leave you with an alternative which is even less good. Something with more pay but a longer commute that eats that pay and then some. Something more dangerous, or less convenient, or less stable, or more stressful. And then you get paid a little more in exchange for losing something that was worth more to you than the money.

> Alternatively, we could offer public healthcare, social housing, and food guarantees, decoupling work from survival.

Or a UBI. Which is what we should do.

This is an eternal fight between people who think they know better and usurp power to decide about someone else's life and people who want to be in charge of their own destiny.