Here’s what minimum wage looks like around the world
A group of garment workers hold stickers bearing $177 during a demonstration demanding an increase of their minimum salary inside the Canadia Industrial Park on September 17, 2014 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
This Tuesday, Los Angeles voted to increase its minimum wage from $9 to $15 by 2020. So far, this makes Los Angeles the largest city in the nation to raise the minimum wage so drastically.
Worldwide, the minimum wage struggle continues in many countries, including the United States, while many other countries people enjoy the protections of robust minimum wages laws. Countries like Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, and North Korea have no wage standard legally in place. Australia and Luxembourg, on the other hand, come in with the highest national minimum wages. After taxes and adjusted for purchasing power, the wage standards of those nations come in at $9.54 and $9.24 USD per hour respectively.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a policy group involving 34 countries, recently created this chart to show you how their minimum wages stack up.
The US comes in 11th on the list, but if President Obama’s goal of raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 succeeds, the nation will be bumped up considerably. Many states are doing their part already. This year alone, 21 states have raised the minimum wage.
The tides are turning more slowly elsewhere. Malaysia is fighting to raise its wage from RM900 to RM1200 a month — that's just $249.27 to $332.35. And just a few weeks ago, Venezuela raised its minimum wage by 30 percent to a whopping 7,421 bolivars per month. Adjusted to the most recent inflation, that’s $37.