Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. None of these nations have an minimim hourly wage enshrined in law. Instead many of the base terms of employment, including wages, are decided via collective bargaining between sector trade unions and representatives of public sector and business interest organizations.
Minimum wage decided by politics is something taken for granted in many parts of the world, but ultimately it’s a question that most of all affects the suppliers (employees) and buyers (employers). The government will always be behind the times in legislation and have many other interests to juggle than yours - don’t just be a passive participant in the market.
I live in Sweden by the way, so feel free to ask me questions on the topic and I’ll do my best to answer.
I’d like to provide some further context. This wasn’t always the case here in Sweden, obviously.
A big shift in our society happened because of the massacre in Ådalen.
This was in the 1930s, during the great depression. People didn’t have jobs, particularly in Ådalen where the unemployment rate was around 85-90%. People were starving. So they worked together, they demonstrated, and the worker parties gained significant support.
The powers that be didn’t like this, naturally. They tried to put a lid on the events, and called in the military. To cut a long story short, the military opened fire and several bystanders were killed. It led to nation-wide demonstrations, and the Social Democrats gained significant following, leading to them being the majority government for decades afterwards. We saw social and worker reforms, and is largely the reason Sweden is held in such high regard internationally.
Things don’t really last however. Private interests are trying to dismantle the system we have here, because it gives workers too much bargaining power. IF Metall has been striking against Tesla for coming up on three years at this point. Tesla has their supporters, because obviously they do. People don’t get that the reason for the strike isn’t because Tesla’s workers necessarily have it bad, but because Tesla is trying to undermine the system we have here, and set a precedent for others to do the same.
In e.g. the U.S., employers have significant power over workers. Some states have at-will employment, where either an employer or a worker can just walk out on the contract whenever. This is only ever to the worker’s benefit when the market is looking for workers; I can’t recall a time in my lifetime where this has been the case. They dangle people’s livelihoods and through things like healthcare, their very lives, to enslave workers.
We are headed down the same path, with well over a decade of right-wing rhetoric, privatisation, and budgets eroding our systems.
It’s election year this year, and I really wish people would remember where we were a hundred years ago.
its tough to fully grasp, i am maybe only now getting it. but we must live in a constant state of revolution.
Yeah. It’s the one thing I find the most exhausting about how democracy works. It requires an ongoing participation, and our society is sadly structured in a manner where that isn’t easily done for everyone, and as such not everyone gets proper representation.
It’s further hampered by the fact that individuals and other institutions with financial means can employ people to do political work for them. This just isn’t feasible for individuals, many of us don’t have much money to spare, and we’re fully occupied between our professional, and our personal lives.
So once participation in democracy starts slipping, when workers are unable to attend, our rights start getting eroded.
This isn’t exactly helped by media, social and otherwise. We live in an attention economy where explosive headlines and bold attention-grabbing statements win out. We don’t get accurate representations of reality, and thus the decisions we make are based on whatever lies we’ve adopted to become our worldview.
The only real solution I see to this is to empower people to have the ability to partake in unions and cultivate a political interest. Otherwise we’ll just be ruled by the oligarchs and we’ll return to a more or less feudal state of things.
I’m trying really hard to engage politically in my area, but honestly the only party that seems to put themselves out there is the nazi party, so I’m hardly surprised that they’ve been garnering a lot of followers for the past decade.