The minimum wage and the Big Mac
There has been a cute little meme circulating on the internet which I use as the featured image for this post. This idea being… apparently… that in Australia the minimum wage is higher than the US yet the price of the commodity, here a burger from McDonald’s, is cheaper. Therefore, it is evil capitalist plutocrats who are screwing the people. And, presumably, the way to fix that problem is not to improve your skill set and move to a better job but to unleash government on the evil capitalists, take their sh** and give it to you. That is the American way, right?
Life is rarely as simple as a Facebook meme.
Australia has several minimum wages. While someone 21 and older working at McDonalds does get $16+ an hour, not every employee gets that and the data are in Australian dollars (conversion tool)
[chart at the link]
This has the predictable impact:
There has been a cute little meme circulating on the internet which I use as the featured image for this post. This idea being… apparently… that in Australia the minimum wage is higher than the US yet the price of the commodity, here a burger from McDonald’s, is cheaper. Therefore, it is evil capitalist plutocrats who are screwing the people. And, presumably, the way to fix that problem is not to improve your skill set and move to a better job but to unleash government on the evil capitalists, take their sh** and give it to you. That is the American way, right?
Life is rarely as simple as a Facebook meme.
Australia has several minimum wages. While someone 21 and older working at McDonalds does get $16+ an hour, not every employee gets that and the data are in Australian dollars (conversion tool)
[chart at the link]
This has the predictable impact:
To start, some Australians actually make less than the adult minimum wage. The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald’s struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they’d make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia’s Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country’s fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald’s relies heavily on young workers in Australia. It’s a specific quirk of the country’s wage system. But it goes to show that even in generally high-pay countries, restaurants try to save on labor where they can.
