The (now deleted) comment poking fun at the German minimum wage is especially funny if you consider how anti-union Tesla is and that the German industrial union

The (now deleted) comment poking fun at the German minimum wage is especially funny if you consider how anti-union Tesla is and that the German industrial union IG Metall only last month managed to get into Tesla, despite the management's best efforts. The minimum wage in Germany is €12/h (Oct 2022), compared to $7.25/h in the US (2009). When introduced in 2015 the German minimum wage was €8.50/h. If it had only ever been adjusted for inflation, it would have been at €10.05/h at the start of 2023. By contrast, if the US minimum wage had been adjusted for inflation following its last adjustment in 2009, it would have been at $10.40/h by now. Remember that anything less than correcting for inflation represents an income reduction as it means a loss of spending power. For additional context: in German law, minimum wage is tied to a representative index of union wages (the Tariflohnindex, tracked by the federal office of statistics). Despite an overall decline in membership (mostly due to the "liberalization" of the job market, i.e. the creation of temp work agencies whose "contractors" can not join unions - though these may still benefit from union wages negotiated in the companies they are stationed at, and the heavy regulation around unions effectively prohibiting micro-unions like in the US or coordinated "solidarity" strikes) this index provides a good "temperature gauge" for wage developments. In other words: when union wages (in aggregate) go up, minimum wage goes up. When they stagnate, minimum wage stagnates. This is different from welfare (formerly Hartz IV, now Bürgergeld, which previously was supposed to be a form of federal UBI) which is intended to track inflation as it is only meant to cover a standard of "needs" (which in turn are supposed to be individualized by taking into account various factors like number of people in the household). In other words: welfare exists to provide a social safety net to cover a person's needs, federal minimum wage exists to provide a baseline for wages to ensure employees are paid a non-exploitative wage for their labor if they're unable to join a union that would help them negotiate a better wage and there is no union available to them. So minimum wage is really more of a "fallback union wage", typically benefitting direct hires in low prestige jobs like cleaning. Note that a better equivalent of American company-specific unions is the construct of a Betriebsrat, a form of works council, which the employees of any company with at least 5 "regular employees" are eligible to form and grants special protections to its elected officials (the number of which is also specified by law). Neither has anything to do with worker ownership, i.e. cooperatives, or employee share schemes (more common in the US).