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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.

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Norway effectively does as union collective agreements apply to everyone, Sweden again uses collective bargaining, Finland again covers effectively every employee with collective bargaining. Germany does have a minimum wage as of 2015 so that’s just wrong. I’m not going to fact check the others but I imagine it’s a similar situation. It’s not like these countries are lawless and allow rampant employee exploitation.

Several Swiss cantons have minimum wage (Geneva starting from this month for instance). Also collective bargaining is pretty common as well (e,g, in the watch industry).

Sweden does have minimum wages, negotiated by their unions. Basically everyone is a part of them, so it makes sense for them to negotiate the wages instead of the government. Effectively there is no difference though.

Is it illegal for someone to work for less than amount $X/unit of time? Or merely uncommon?

It would be a civil breach of contract between the employer and the union, right?

Not for those who aren’t part of a union. I’m asking to understand the edge case, not to see if an employer could violate a union contract.

There are people working for very little, but it is very rare. For example you make at least $15 an hour at McDonalds in Sweden since that is what the union agreement is for that sector. McDonalds isn't forced to sign it, but if they do they are protected against strikes. However you can have a small company without union agreement and pay whatever you like, but if your employees are in a union they might use it to start a strike action if your conditions are too bad.

Note that in Sweden unions aren't company specific so there is no way to prevent people from joining one.

Sometimes it's not about what the law says, but about what society does. In practice, these are the minimum wages. Perhaps you can diverge from them for a while without punishment, but that doesn't make them not the minimum wages. It just means that the enforcement is different.

Arguing about the legality is a harmful modern fetish that especially in contexts such as these does not help us move along.

They have strong labor unions who set effective minimum wages in collective wage agreements.

Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.

Germany does have minimum wage since 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany

This argument only makes sense if you are not ideological about minimum wage laws. Which most people are. This whole thing does not stem from the desire to help others but from the strict ideological position that any regulation that _seems_ to favor the worker must indeed favor the worker.

There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.

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