The Danish burger flipper

A while ago I linked to the graphic above in one of the link round-ups.  From time to time it appears in posts on Tumblr, often with some commentary of which this is fairly typical, attributing the difference to stronger unions and better government regulations in Scandinavia.

Since then I have wondered whether it's really true, though.  There's a lot of misinformation on Tumblr (as on the internet generally), and anyone can throw together a striking graphic.  As I discussed briefly here (item 2), the US economy since the Reagan administration has changed drastically from how it was before, with 30 years of wage stagnation and people in jobs which would formerly have supported a solid standard of living now struggling to get by.  But could the relative position of American workers really be as bad as the graphic suggests?

This week I finally looked it up.  It is true.  According to Business Insider, fast-food workers in Denmark do make a minimum of $20 per hour, more than twice what Americans in the same job do.  The article points out that the cost of living in Denmark is 30% higher, but the effective difference is still enormous.

Is Denmark an outlier for some reason?  I was able to find a few other comparisons.  In New Zealand the minimum wage is equivalent to US$12.35, so fast-food workers make at least that much -- a lot less than in Denmark but a lot more than here.  The same is true of France (minimum wage about US$12.00) and Australia (US$14.50).  So Denmark is at one extreme of the scale, yes -- but the US is at the opposite extreme.  The push for a $15 minimum wage isn't radical at all.  Australia is already pretty close to that.

These higher wages don't make burgers unaffordable, by the way.  According to Business Insider, a Bic Mac in Denmark costs only 80¢ more than in the US.

It's not just fast-food workers, either.  For a semi-skilled (accounting) office job, I make somewhat less than that Danish burger flipper.  That's partly due to it being a temp job, but even a permanent job of that type would typically pay around $20 per hour, sometimes less (though medical insurance is included, a burden employers in other advanced countries don't need to bear).  If my current job goes permanent, and I finally make as much as the Danish burger flipper, I'll feel like I'm doing pretty well.

Then of course there are the differences we already know about, such as government-mandated minimum vacation and government-guaranteed health coverage, so workers in those countries aren't struggling to pay health premiums of hundreds of dollars a month out of those wages (though presumably their taxes are somewhat higher than ours).

Overall, I've long had the impression that ordinary non-rich Americans work harder and longer than their counterparts in other advanced countries, and get a lot less for it.  Well, all that wealth the upper 1% have accumulated during those 30 years of wage stagnation obviously had to come from somewhere.  One wonders how many Republican-voting wage-earners realize this.  More Americans seem to be becoming dimly aware that people in other advanced countries pay a lot less for health care (even when the tax burden is included), don't need to worry about being denied access to it for lack of insurance, and get overall better outcomes in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, and suchlike.  But by and large the nation's mentality seems to be stuck in the 1970s, convinced that the US system and way of life are still the envy of the world.  Many people actually take offense at any suggestion that some other country might be doing something better than we are or that we could learn from them.  This, in itself, is an alarming sign of a society in decline.