At A Minimum

I might have mentioned that Australian restaurants, etc. charge a 10% surcharge on weekends (15% on holidays). I'm not sure if this is a custom or a law, but, it is based on a minimum wage -law- which requires premium wages on the same basis.

Actually, the Australian labour department publishes an incredibly detailed minimum wage law that attempts to categorize every job and assign a unique minimum wage to it, with adjustments for things like: under 21, disabled, apprentice, weekends/holidays etc. (notable by absence: geography, but I might have missed it). They have a similarly byzantine seeming system to assign minimum holiday and severance.

From what I could gather, a Starbucks coffee slinger earns $25 base, $27 on weekends and gets 4 weeks severance pay with 2 weeks notice. A$ and C$ are more or less equivalent, within a few %.

As per my Chilean friend, although Australian prices are much higher than Canada, so are the wages, and on balance, in his opinion (he mostly works as an Uber Eats deliverer, which is -incredibly- popular here, they are -everywhere-), Australia comes out ahead.

Anyway, is all this detail in minimum wage laws a good thing? I'm not sure. It might replace howls of generalized outrage over how unfair it is to apply the same minimum wage to everyone, with howls of individual outrage about misclassifications, not to mention a presumably large and subjectivity-driven organization to maintain all this.

I remember once - years ago - taking some kind of ethics course which opined that countries like Russia, which apparently attempt to codify every possible situation, are at a disadvantage to countries like America, where they, at best, publish broad principles and then let lawyers sort it all out.

By the way, as I vaguely understand it, in Scandinavia: there are no minimum wage laws, and, almost everyone belongs to a union. But companies and unions view each other as partners and strikes are relatively unheard of. Perhaps this will change as the economic situation deteriorates. I hope not.

Anyhow, all of this is yet another interesting debate ...

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