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Every "minimum wage" job I've ever worked (I'm in Australia) has paid at or above $15USD/hr. We have plenty of jobs and plenty of restaurants. Why is the US dif

• jfengel 6y ago
  I don't know the details of Australian working life, so I can't speak to the specific differences. But a lot of things push down the lowest labor rates in the US: * A long history of slavery followed by systemic disenfranchisement, creating an underclass of poorly-educated people with few job skills and difficulty obtaining any employment. * A slightly-shorter-but-still-long history of using labor from people not legally allowed to be in the country, to whom protections (including the minimum wage) apply only sporadically or not at all. * Collapse of labor unions (happening now in Australia, I gather, but ongoing for four or five decades in the US) * Active, well-funded hostility to minimum wage laws, driven in part by a strong temporarily-embarrassed-millionaire ethos[1] in which people believe they will one day be rich and don't want their wealth siphoned off by the undeserving poor (even if they are, currently, poor themselves). * Even more racism, in which the minimum wage is seen as a giveaways to brown-skinned people who would not otherwise be able to earn it. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-socialism-never-took-root-in-america-because-the-poor-see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-socialism-never-took...