The history of the forty hour week stretches back a lot further than WWI and unions are a lot more powerful than you're giving them credit for. Now, unions have a good portion of that power because violence is never fully off the table - but the blood spilled for American labor rights was mostly spilled by Americans at the hands of Pinkertons. A lot of other countries saw the writing on the wall and adopted those rights peacefully, but there are a lot of famous labor actions that happened in places other than Russia. The toppling of the Tzar certainly helped, but I think you're giving it too much credit.

That's a perfectly reasonable solution... do you think the restaurant managers that try their damnedest to avoid paying waiters a livable wage and are statistically the most likely employers to commit wage theft or tax fraud - as well as advocating for tipping culture to again try and minimize compensation - do you think they're likely to be on board with a solution that makes shift rotas more complicated? Or do you think they'll continue to try and keep every waiter at exactly 39 hours technically not qualifying as an FTE on the books with duties like tear down being considered off shift?

I don't think this is a reason not to push for 8-4 but I partially agree with the much downvoted comment above that this schedule won't roll out at the same time for everyone.