For more than a decade now, a coalition of unions, workers, and left-wing activists has, through the Fight for 15 movement, focused on winning a higher minimum wage for workers, today increasingly centered on the demand of earning $17 an hour. There’s been less attention paid to whether those workers are actually working enough of those hours to make that $15–$17 count.

That’s the contention of a new report authored by Adelle Waldman and Matt Bruenig for the People’s Policy Project (3P) think tank, titled “Time Is Money,” which puts forward a solution to millions of underworked Americans struggling to get by in the form of legislation mandating a “right to full-time work” for employees who meet certain conditions. The idea would be modeled on similar requirements for employers to accommodate workers that already exist in laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act.

“Given that employers are already required to use labor models that adhere to a slew of specific requirements, it should not be too difficult for employers to comply with new scheduling rules,” the report states. “The history of labor and employment law reforms demonstrates that, despite what they sometimes say, employers are capable of updating their labor models to follow new rules.”

In the potential legislation outlined by 3P, for instance, this right would only apply if it didn’t create an “undue hardship” to the employer, to firms with fifty or more employees, and, of those employees, only to those who have worked three months or more — all provisions cribbed from laws that have been on the books for decades.

The report lays out the scale of the problem of involuntary part-time work, defined as workers who could and would work full-time hours, but do not, totaling 4.9 million people as of January 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). “In this context, increasing the minimum wage without also addressing the issue of hours is insufficient to ensure a living wage,” Waldman and Bruenig write.

Large employers like Walmart have, sometimes explicitly, systematically cut their workers’ hours over the past decades to get out of paying them benefits and to more easily discipline the more rebellious among them, according to the report. The authors point to Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures that show that, going by hourly wages and median employee pay, half or more of workers at companies like Starbucks, Target, and Kohl’s are working part-time hours — in Starbucks’s case, one hour fewer per week than they would need to qualify for benefits.

Yet it’s widely assumed, even sometimes by political allies of wage workers, that they are working full-time hours and so would automatically feel the benefit of a minimum wage hike. BLS data calculates the annual income of retail employees by multiplying hourly wages by a forty-hours-a-week work schedule, even though many retail workers do not have such a schedule. In the process, the report states, this distorts our understanding of how little wage workers are actually being paid.

Involuntary part-time work has been on the rise in the United States. Though usually rising on the cusp of a recession, it has been steadily increasing since 2023 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, despite widespread insistence from politicians and the media that the economy has been booming.

The fight for longer hours may be a novel idea in the United States, but it’s been going on for years elsewhere. Workers and unions in the United Kingdom, for instance, have spent more than a decade waging a battle against “zero hours contracts” that don’t give employees a guaranteed minimum of weekly work hours, which at last count covered 3.6 percent of the country’s workforce, or 1.2 million workers. After years of these campaigns, the current UK government finally moved to ban the practice, though it has been criticized for planning to mandate a minimum of only eight to twenty hours a week.

The 3P report is correct about employers’ ability to adapt to any right to full-time work if and when one is ever signed into law. But the idea is virtually guaranteed to trigger howls of objection from employers who will call it “impossible” or claim it will put them out of business or even crash the economy.

The historical record is littered with identical hyperbolic complaints from big business about a host of basic worker protections we now take for granted, from the forty-hour workweek and the eight-hour day, to the minimum wage and banning child labor, all of which are now (mostly) standard and uncontroversial. The right to full-time work, should it ever get enshrined in law, is certain to go the same way.