Older article but relevant:
http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-employees-pay <snip> First, how much more could Walmart AFFORD to pay its employees, given its current financials?
Here's one way of looking at it.
If Walmart took its entire $22 billion of annual pre-tax income and used all of it to give each one of its 2.1 million employees a raise, this would amount to about $10,000 a year apiece.
In other words, if Walmart decided to use 100% of its operating profit to pay all of its employees more, the average store associate's salary would go from $20,000 to $30,000. If Walmart paid bosses like CEO Mike Duke less (Duke made $6 million last year) that would create some more operating profit. So reducing inequality at the company would also certainly help.
Re-run the numbers using "only" the ~1.4 million employed in the US and it still doesn't work - but it is closer, bumping the salary to around $35k. Really damn good for sliding boxes of Tasty-Os across a cash register. Cut the hours in half and still pay that much per hour and it's essentially the equivalent of making $70k per year were it a 40-hour week.
For working a cash register. Does that make sense to anyone? How is the local mom-and-pop store supposed to make that work?
So even hugely successful and profitable Walmart, a company employing scads of people in the occupation group we're talking about, can't afford to do what you propose. Note that the quote talks about pre-tax profit, so even with the full measure of their profit they couldn't make it work, let alone pay their own people that much AND pay the higher taxes required to support others - a tax they wouldn't pay since anyway since $35k would eat up all of their profits, and thus no biz income tax. Higher wages would get some of that back but not even half since that income level pays little tax already. And if cost controls were instituted on the staples they sell, that would either make it impossible to stay in business or else the prices of the non-controlled products would go way up: inflation. That doesn't even figure hiring twice as many people at that rate since they're now only working 20 hours per week.
That's just one company. Plenty of big retailers and grocery chains are in the same position: employing hundreds of thousands of people - often on thinner margins and lower profit than Walmart - and the proposal demands a doubling (or worse) of their labor cost while mandating they can't raise prices on many products - especially in the case of grocery retailers - to help pay those people the higher wages.
Among all the other problems, there are a large number of occupations where a drastic reduction in working hours simply isn't feasible. Doctors and nurses / healthcare pros, police / fire / EMS, farmers, managers, truck drivers, maintenance / repair staff, construction workers... that scratches the surface. We can't make a huge cut in hours for healthcare workers without either cutting back the availability of those services or taking a big hit in quality as those extra positions are filled with people who don't have adequate training in the required field. Speaking of fields, farmers and many construction workers operate under the rules of Mother Nature, so they also are not able to work less: the work needs to be done by a certain time, dictated by weather and the general march of seasons. Throwing more warm bodies at these tasks doesn't work: skill and expertise is required.
So what you'll have is a group of workers putting in half the hours - or non-workers putting in no hours (and why would they work since the baseline 'income' is guaranteed for everyone?) - making nearly as much as the skilled long-haul truck driver who is working full time. And the other group - the worker putting in a full day five days or more per week, the ones who often have some sort of specialized training that came at the expense of personal time and money - will be supporting, through taxes, the leisurely lifestyles of those who work either half the time or not at all.
One could say that the extra time will be used for the benefit of society, but I deal all the time with the type of worker who would benefit from the proposal, and so so many of these are not the people who are going to help make gains for society. But some will; kudos to them. Are they enough to make up for the rest? The rest will be spending more time on Facebook and XBone, not volunteering at the local elementary school.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are busting ass for 40-60 hours per week to support those working very little.
For good reasons, I think it's going to be an uphill battle selling that.