It's a few years old now, but Table 5 here is interesting from that perspective, showing percentage of workers in countries without minimum wages, who are inste

It's a few years old now, but Table 5 here is interesting from that perspective, showing percentage of workers in countries without minimum wages, who are instead covered by a union minimum wage: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2005/07/study/tn0507101s.htm http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2005/07/study/tn0507101s... Countries like Denmark and Austria are sometimes touted as examples of how you can have no minimum wage and still good working conditions, but they really do have something very close to a minimum wage. It's negotiated through a corporatist labor framework rather than passed directly by a legislature, but the end result is that 98% of Austrian workers and about 85% of Danish workers are covered by a minimum wage (in Denmark it is 109 DKK, about €15/hr). Germany by contrast has much lower rates of union coverage (69% as of 2003, and rapidly dropping), making that mechanism less effective. One solution could be to introduce a de jure minimum wage, as Germany now seems likely to do. Another solution could be to change Germany's labor framework so it's closer to the one that prevails in Denmark and Austria, countries that have systems that more or less guarantee that large workplaces are always unionized.