Suppose you want to create jobs in your society. Does it seem logical that to create more jobs, you need to restrict the effort of the people who already have jobs? Well, sort of. If it currently takes 100 people to do a certain task, then cutting their work effort in half would then require 200 people to get the job done.
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Doubts start to creep in when you wonder about whether the amount of work being done would stay constant if you had to pay twice as many people. And then there's the question of wages. Would they simply fall in half? After all, there are costs related to having another employee regardless of how much they work—record-keeping and maybe other fixed costs.
Maybe cutting work effort in half wouldn't double the demand for labor after all. Maybe it would reduce the demand for labor. For example, if you weren't allowed to cut wages in half, then legislation that cuts work effort in half would actually make workers less attractive. It would create an incentive to find different methods of production that use machines instead of labor.
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