Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. None of these nations have an minimim hourly wage enshrined in law. Instead many of the base terms of employment, including wages, are decided via collective bargaining between sector trade unions and representatives of public sector and business interest organizations.
I live in Sweden by the way, so feel free to ask me questions on the topic and I’ll do my best to answer.
I used to teach English in Japan. There was apparently a time long ago when native English teachers were treated very badly in Japan. The companies would pay them a pittance and there are stories that some companies confiscated teacher passports. Very bad stuff.
So one remedy that the Japanese government pursued was to establish a minimum wage for teachers. But it didn’t increase for I think decades, and the amount was, once again, became to live on. I don’t know whether Japan has increased this minimum wage since then.
Minimum wages need to be based on some other value so that they adjust naturally and we don’t have to wait on lawmakers to manually adjust them, even if they could pass manual updates.
One other idea is to have a wealth ceiling. And then base minimum wage off of that. For example, say that the maximum is X and the minimum wage would be X divided by a billion. If Elon musk want to have 20 billion, then minimum wage would be $20/hour. That’s just a quick example and not meant to be indicative of the actual numbers.
I like the wealth ceiling idea. Would encourage the 2% to “deal with” the 1%, just so they can lower their minimum wage.
Probably gets a bit dystopian quickly.
I dunno when you left but I’m pretty sure wages for English teachers suck these days. Probably not so much black company activity (confiscating passports etc) but in the last 15ish years there have been enough weebs flooding into the country such that companies can pay peanuts.