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.
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.