No, it's two different things, the hours and the wage. It's not just hourly wage. I can tell you companies are super square, making no deals where an employee can work a bit fewer hours a week, for a bit less money. If you want to work even 10% less hours, they cut your salary in half. And usually they start there and work on ways to cut you down again and again.

And modern jobs aren't productive for 40 hours per week of ass-in-seats. I can tell you my case is more extreme, the best work of my career as an algorithmist (like an inventor) amounts to like an hour over the course of over a decade. So Chilean ingenegreros comerciales (pathologically avaricious businessmen) see that and say, OK for that decade with one productive hour, we'll pay you one hour of wages. If you want a decade of wages, perform what you performed in that miraculous hour 30,000 times.

And in fact, now that the company gets 32 hours out of people, people can spend more time working the job market, and might need more Bobs and Charlies altogether to have the amount of authority their egos crave, so the job market tightens up, raising wages. I think this happened with previous hour decreases in like the twenties and thirties, it's been shown that is great for workers. That just came to a complete stop in the forties, no progress since then, despite Keynes for example predicting by now we'd be working twelve hour weeks. And getting more time outside the office, in particular by commuting one less day, that's huge. Employers lose 8 hours of the in fact negative returns on time spent in the office, so really they're losing nothing but power (which to be fair is what being a boss is truly all about), but they gain money from more creative workers, and then the worker doesn't gain 8 hours, he gains 11 hours, of the worst hours he spends in the office, when he's most tired. Then he goes home and does things that make him more creative when he goes back to the office, like a hobby or woodworking or homeschooling and charges his boss nothing for it, the boss ought to be grateful, do you know any who are?

So France imposed fewer hours specifically to get companies to hire more workers. California is not doing it with that in mind, but it will be a side-effect. French companies hated that, in fact making sacrifices to make the statistical results of that move look bad, diametrically contrary to the enormous benefits shown in the early twentieth century. You think companies can't collude on statistics?

So Purdue Pharma may call itself a pharmaceutical company but it's not, it's a mathematical research institute that uses brilliant new theorems involving the equals sign to make billions of dollars. So for OxyContin, they demonstrated to FDA that 7==12 and that theorem made them tens of billions, then they tried 60==100 and eureka! They made great money too with methylphenidate hydrochloride with that innovative theorem, how do they keep coming up with this stuff?

So then, theorem in hand, they first lobbied and who knows what else to reduce methylphenidate chlorhidrate dosage limits from 100 to 60, then they introduced methylphenidate hydrochloride as the only methylphenidate available above 60 milligrams, up to 100 mg, and made it extremely painful just motherfucking brutal for doctors to complete the form for patients who were prescribed more than the new limit that were grandfathered in. Like it's the most horrible thing you can ask a psychiatrist to do, nothing compares with that form literally bureaucratic sadism, Kafka for doctors. Their shit costs $500 a month, whereas methylphenidate chlorhydrate is under $20, generic. Basically patented methylphenidate chlorhydrate again seventy years after it was patented by Novartis.