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.

17-minute video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDLwgsDzzM

• https://yt.chocolatemoo53.com/watch?v=lgDLwgsDzzM
• https://inv.thepixora.com/watch?v=lgDLwgsDzzM

From what I've heard, Norwegian unions are actively against a national minimum wage, because they believe that would act as a low anchor harming their negotiations.

Although there is no national minimum wage in Norway, certain industries or specific groups do have a specific minimum wage. For example, there is a legally mandated minimum wage for minors, to avoid them being exploited in summer jobs.

In other cases, unions have negotiated fixed levels for their focus areas (e.g. engineers working government jobs), and everyone working those jobs, whether they're members of the union or not, will get paid those levels. Sometimes everyone in the group gets a raise simultaneously as a result of annual union negotiations.

Is it true that all wages are public, though?
Cause that might have something to do with the strong bargaining power of employees.

Yes, this is public information. You can go to the Swedish tax agency and ask for an excerpt. There are also information brokers who make it their business to collate private information that's available publicly and publish it for a fee.

These companies have been a bit of a thorn in our side because that's not exactly how the system was intended, and it's made it a lot easier for e.g. stalkers to find information on you. Information like where you live, your income, your social ID number, birthdate, size of your home, if in a flat, which door is yours, sometimes even with direct instructions from the entrance. It's bananas.

Personally I think these laws need to be looked over. I don't think having salaries available publicly is harmful, but I've personally had problems with a person being able to dig up my info and harassing me. All this was different in an age where you had to report to the tax agency and request an excerpt, contra now where you can just pay a small sum to an information broker and get all of it without the system knowing who requested it.

Does/did (June this year) the new EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) affect things?

I used to teach English in Japan. There was apparently a time long ago when native English teachers were treated very badly in Japan. The companies would pay them a pittance and there are stories that some companies confiscated teacher passports. Very bad stuff.

So one remedy that the Japanese government pursued was to establish a minimum wage for teachers. But it didn't increase for I think decades, and the amount was, once again, difficult to live on. I don't know whether Japan has increased this minimum wage since then.

Minimum wages need to be based on some other value so that they adjust naturally and we don't have to wait on lawmakers to manually adjust them, even if they could pass manual updates.

One other idea is to have a wealth ceiling. And then base minimum wage off of that. For example, say that the maximum is X and the minimum wage would be X divided by a billion. If Elon musk wants to have 20 billion, then minimum wage would be $20/hour. That's just a quick example and not meant to be indicative of the actual numbers.

At least for Norway, this is not technically true, but it also doesn't matter.

Unions will run surveys across their members every year, and as long as they have enough members to have bargaining power, they also have the data. So they don't really need all wages to be public in order to negotiate.

What is public in Norway, is the total taxable income of individuals. This is meant as a measure against tax fraud, and also an annual source of entertainment as you look up local and national rankings of who paid the most taxes, check that you're still making more than your middle school bully, and so forth. But total taxable income can contain more than wages, so that is not really the number you're referring to, and as mentioned the union has better data anyway.

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.

My first time in Norway (2010) I noticed right away that the prices were pretty obscene, so the first thing I did when I arrived at the hostel was to ask the guy behind the counter what the minimum wage was. He didn't even know the concept of minimum wage.

I like the wealth ceiling idea. Would encourage the 2% to "deal with" the 1%, just so they can lower their minimum wage.

Probably gets a bit dystopian quickly.

That is just one guy behind a counter. Of course we know what the concept of minimum wage is in the Nordics, it is very much part of the Nordic model.

It's true for Sweden, but it's not exactly common to go look up what someone else earns. You have to pay for making the request and it's not exactly convenient.

It does mean that the newspapers publish lists of who makes the most money each year though which is always a hoot.

Practically speaking I don't think much is gained in bargaining power from wages being public

its tough to fully grasp, i am maybe only now getting it. but we must live in a constant state of revolution.

Wouldn't the problem of the government not keeping up be solved by just indexing minimum wage to inflation?

The bargaining power is probably better than the one we have in France for that matter. Asking how much someone earns is still a big taboo in here.

The point is that there are people that don't. And that tells something very interesting about labor relations.

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.

Yeah, what workers see as a floor, companies see as a ceiling.

"Minimum wage means the company wants to pay you even less but it's illegal" lol

But seriously even tho the min wage hasn't increased since 2009 in the U.S. I think most fast food places start at $9 or $10 / hr. Still a slap in the face, but they at least realized the min wage was way too low and nobody would work at that pay.

Sure, but generally by collective bargaining produces a higher wage for the employee

It used to work like that in Italy, although not with a national minimum wage but with union-negotiated contracts. At least some of them had a clause that automatically raised base salaries according to inflation.

I read somewhere that clause was removed because it'd cause a vicious loop where raising inflation meant higher wages, which in turn drove up inflation.

At face value it makes sense, but I'm no expert so I can't say whether that's correct or some bs to keep wages low.

No, only in Sweden.
And if you look up someone, they will be notified of who did it.

What's the EU Pay Transparency Directive?

Por qué no los dos?

In the US, minimum wage is seen as a goal, not a means to provide adequate compensation.

son mutuamente excluyentes

So that’s why they all have to work 3 jobs at least to pay rent. Oh wait, that’s only in ‘Murica the case

My understanding of the research is that a higher minimum wage can increase costs, but as a lesser proportion than the increase (edit; to the wage). Labor costs are only portion of expenses for any business, and workers making minimum wage only reflect a portion of the workforce. So, there's not a zero effect, but I believe it's usually less than fear mongering would suggest.

I haven't read into this in at least five years, so happy to admit my own incorrectness if someone knows better.

It's mainly about gender pay equality, but the EU has been working on that for some decades now. They're now basically shifting into next gear.
Apart from that, there's going to be an immediately visible difference for all employees as the average pay of their colleagues as well as the expected development of their own pay will have to be made transparent to them. Also, it will be forbidden to ask for your current/ previous pay during job interviews.

talk about worrying a out minutia instead of actual outcomes

gonna assume this is engagement bait

A globally defined minimum wage is a dumb idea. Even more so if it's defined over a large area with wildly differing economic areas. Like for instance the United States.

Yet people who should know better, like Bernie Sanders, are actively talking about raising the federal minimum wage. Instead of the obvious idea, which would be to remove the whole thing.

In Oregon we changed our minimum wage to go up some each year for a few years then be indexed to inflation via the consumer price index. Feel like that plus an extra bit of indexing to population helps a lot.

https://www.oregon.gov/boli/workers/pages/minimum-wage.aspx

The main thing I saw was categorisation of wages/positions, so if I have a worker that is exceeding the perquisites of the current position they get automatically promoted (eg from junior to senior position of the same job).

That, and that sem job description can't differ more that 5% (or something like that) from the wages of others with abut the same job description.

Yes, what you would expect from the name, but just a tiny bit more than that as it deals with (indirectly) promotions and wage gaps too, companies need to incorporate & codify wages a bit further than just how much of a fight an individual worker gives up.

The basic thing is that every job position needs to have a wage specification.

Ive always said I would rather have a maximum income than a minimum one. minimum will solve itself when you make sure one person can't like buy every single bushel of wheat that the world produces in a year.

De facto there is a minimum wage, de jure no. But just know there is. It's a bit different for different industries.

No they're not?

They can be used as a low anchor in bargaining which may undermine negotiations

Sounds like it could be useful

Wealth caps

Nobody should have a networth of over 10 million

I work at a museum in the US dedicated to Nordic history and heritage. We were all at-will employed until we unionized recently. It is still shocking to me the amount of cognitive dissonance people are capable of as they long for the prosperity of the Nordic countries, but then openly bash unions and workers. The work culture is so bad here, it’s like everyone is under a persistent fog.

Any talk of abolishing the wage system?

It's amazing how far right we've come since the late 1800s

I used to teach English in Japan. There was apparently a time long ago when native English teachers were treated very badly in Japan. The companies would pay them a pittance

I dunno when you left but I'm pretty sure wages for English teachers suck these days. Probably not so much black company activity (confiscating passports etc) but in the last 15ish years there have been enough weebs flooding into the country such that companies can pay peanuts.

And that is exactly why gig workers are still getting screwed in Scandinavia. Talk to a Wolt delivery person, and you will quickly support a federal minimum wage.

cali does raise thier MW often, but its also HCOL so im not surprising oregons doing this.

As I understand it, they are not employees, minimum wage does not apply. They are each independent, legally running their own company. A company can sell their services as cheap as they want.

I don't understand how that works, because it's illegal to run a company and then work as if you're an employee. Specially not when the purpose is obviously to get around the law for employees.

Not in Denmark. Although there's a law on the way, so every employee will know their range.

I think that means that from the title, you will know that everyone in the company with that title, will have between X and Y salary.

This should help negotiating salary in a more fair way.

In Germany, there are specialized companies who receive that salary info from businesses in exchange for giving them the salary info from other businesses. And also sell that info.
But private citizens don't get access to it.

Norway as well

Works the same way in Switzerland. Some places may have a minimum wage locally, but it's rare and on a national level there's nothing. However the unions aren't strong in all sectors so some jobs really do pay shit.