Yeah, jobs. And yeah, it was fucking stupid. Imagine outlawing opening the front door to any business, so that every business would have to hire greeters to generate jobs. Same same.
It’s just welfare, but in its cruelest possible form. If we’re going to require someone to piss 8 hours of their day away contributing nothing to society (worse than nothing in practice… gassing up in Oregon took FOREVER cuz you’d be stuck waiting for an attendant to serve a backup of 15 cars) just so that person can collect a pay check… why not just give them the pay check with no strings attached? Then they can use that time to improve themselves, or at the very least, not spend their waking hours inhaling gasoline fumes and ruining their knees and such.
Protect people, not jobs. Robots and AI are replacing most of us soon anyway: mandating busywork is NOT the solution to getting food on everyone’s table.