O n a recent morning partway through France’s historic heat wave, Dhafer Kahri, an air-conditioning technician, let me join him on a house call to an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where he was trying to bring a unit back to life. Kahri’s phone rang so often—several times an hour, all day long—that he worked with his AirPods in. With more work than he could handle, he could freely apologize with the magic words The boss won’t do it for rejecting jobs that he, the boss, didn’t want to