When labour is scarce and desired, this is true. People who are in-demand right now can indeed set their terms (buddy of mine at a place with "unlimited vacation" took 2-3 months off a year because he knew they desperately needed him).
For everyone else, though, this works the other way too. All you need is for one person who's facing foreclosure to put in 110 hour weeks before it becomes the norm.
Hell, how many people here are on Slack at the weekend because their colleagues are and they fear looking lazy, and not because they're "passionate" (or whatever BS word we're using to describe abuse)
This is why we need less regulations so that there will be more alternatives to choose from. More employers = more chance there will be an employer that will not raise the bar of how many hours a worker needs to work in a week.
By introducing more and more regulations, it's more complicated to run the business. Less people are creating businesses, because it's so complicated to run it, and regulations change from year to year. So, the only real beneficiary of regulations are businesses established 100 years ago, where there were not much regulations, and they had their 'hothouse' conditions allowing them to grow without much competition.
In my country in small towns there are i.e. 3 companies to choose from when a person is trying to find a low-tech job. The owner of the first company is a good buddy with the mayor, the second company has a big legal department and is able to pull lots of million of PLNs from EU's dotations, and the third one will probably end their life in few next years, because it's too hard to compete with the previous two. So, in this context, it is possible that the previous 2 will just raise the work time bar and nobody will shed a tear about anyone.
The idea is nice but we've tried this, and it got us hellish levels of inequality (gilded age, etc.).
I do see what you're saying, for instance setting a maximum interest rate on payday loans caused lenders to shift to that maximum (even those which were below before), and having rules about what's part-time or full-time work does tend to solidify jobs around those points (get as much work out of them as you can without providing health insurance, etc.) but the alternative doesn't seem to work.
It sounds as if inequality in the gilded age was mostly caused by masses of immigrants entering the country, hoping for a share of the high wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
If that is the case, it seems unwarranted to present it as an example of failure. Poor people were attracted by the success, and accommodating them was not seamless. But how could it be - no system can be prepared for that.
For everyone else, though, this works the other way too. All you need is for one person who's facing foreclosure to put in 110 hour weeks before it becomes the norm.
Hell, how many people here are on Slack at the weekend because their colleagues are and they fear looking lazy, and not because they're "passionate" (or whatever BS word we're using to describe abuse)