Then shouldn't they be working more personally? Or shouldn't they no longer be in business? (And yeah, I'm well aware how much many small restaurant owners work. See door number two.)

People around here talk a lot about unsustainable business models. I don't think it's really any better if it's offloading its unsustainability onto its workforce, which is what's being described here.

From where I stand, as somebody whose career can be described (cynically but not incorrectly) as largely rendering people unemployed, there's a tension here that's only going to be resolved through the acknowledgement that there isn't actually a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go", and unsustainably poor work with poverty as the retribution for refusing to participate (as well as the reward for participating) is not a politically stable position.

>>>that there isn't actually a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go"

So what is the proposal? Pay people to stay home forever? Who determines who gets a free ride paid for by productive people, and who has to be the ones that provide that free ride to others.

be sure to sign me up for the free ride, but I sure as hell do not want to work 50+ hours a week so other people can play Call of Duty all day.... I would rather let other people work and I play Call of Duty

And their lies the rub / problem with socialism... If everyone can have a free ride no one works

Shorter work week, more vacations. Spread the work across more people. Instead of 1 person working 50 hours, have 2 people work 25 hours. Instead of 2 weeks off a year, have 2 months. Oh, and untie healthcare from employment.

That was the idea behind the 35 hour work week in France. Didn't work out as expected: unemployment didn't go down.

More recently, they had removed some tax breaks on overtime, but it turned out that that only hurt the people needing to work overtime; still no effect on unemployment. At least some of the breaks are now back.

I think the broader issue is that most people having to work crazy hours with multiple jobs don't do it because they're workaholics, but because they have to, as in they can't get a single "normal" job that pays well enough for whatever reason. I'm not sure that putting random limits on the number of hours worked will increase the hourly wages.

I think the underlying issue even above that is we've automated away the need for workers, yet people still exist. So let's say our economy only really needs 100 million people to do stuff and there are 150 million people, that's an obvious disparity. What really sucks is automation is cranking up but the next generation will be even bigger than the Millennials, which were much larger than GenX. So in the next few decades we'll have 160 million people and only need 95 million people, etc. This will keep happening until something breaks.

At some point crimes of desperation will become rampant.

People need work to keep them occupied. It's built in to our psychology by evolution. We know that idle people cause most of the problems in society. So I do think there is a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go", if by "go" you mean have a peaceful, civilized way of living.

This sounds teleological. I can find plenty of things to do, many probably more personally fulfilling as well as societally beneficial, than flipping burgers would be.

I think there’s some merit in what you say, I’m just not sure we would agree on how to define “…large number of restaurant owners…”

This is completely anecdotal, but I know three different restaurant owners and all three of them live very very comfortably. Again, that’s just anecdotal so probably not worth much.

While I don’t think anyone would suggest that a restaurant owner should live in poverty, at the same time I don’t think we would suggest a restaurant worker should be poverty levels of poor to ensure the owner lives the high life.

If a business cant supply both its owner and workers a livable wage, then we should expect the business to go under rather than expect (or demand) the workers descend into poverty.