I have seen a meme going around about a young lady who works at McDonald’s and earns not only over $20/hour, but gets full benefits. It doesn’t say what position she has, but unless she is in corporate, or part owner of a franchise, I highly doubt it. I used to service various fast food restaurants, including McDonald’s, as a server technician. I made what I thought was a great hourly rate, but was a little less than what was claimed in the meme, and I had much fewer benefits.
It’s my understanding that yes, they do make a significantly higher hourly rate than North Americans, however, they also pay higher taxes to cover their system of socialized medicine, education, etc.
Here’s everything you want to know aboutDenmark’s minimum wage.
TLDR - the $20 figure was an error in currency conversion.
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Scandinavia is expensive, and a meal at McDonald’s may cost a significant portion of that hour’s work (maybe 30 mins worth?)
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What is the goal of this image? If the goal is to push higher minimum wage in the US or elsewhere, it’s kind of self-defeating as Denmark has no minimum wage, though de facto they get paid well.
This site more-or-less supports that number.
I know nothing of Denmark, but just for comparison in Australia (which has a much lower cost of living) an adult fast food worker should get between $AU19 ($US15) and $AU58 ($US44) an hour depending on management status, employment status, and exactly what your work days are (the ‘jackpot’ rate there is ‘adult casual employee managing 2 or more staff, working on a public holiday’. Nobody would get that rate all the time, but you might have a good shot at getting more than your share of lucrative hours if you had a good relationship with your manager)
Most staff aren’t adults, of course, which is how Maccas avoids going bankrupt. But the pay rates are official.
[Cite](file:///Users/emma/Downloads/fast-food-industry-award-ma000003-pay-guide.pdf)
All true, but much lower? Australian cities top the cost of living indices. Like the US and unlike Denmark, it’s a large place, but the majority of the population lives in these cities.
But that’s a cost of living index based on the expenditure patterns of internationally-mobile expatriate employees. Not many McDonalds workers are internationally-mobile expatriate employees, and it’s unlikely they’re needing to spend their money on the things internationally-mobile expatriate employees spend their money money on.
Ironically, one common rough-and-ready way of comparing the purchasing power of earnings in two different economies is the Big Mac index; how many Big Macs can you buy with an hour’s earnings? As Wikipedia puts it, the Big Mac is “a relatively standardized product that includes input costs from a wide range of sectors in the local economy, such as agricultural commodities (beef, bread, lettuce, cheese), labor (blue and white collar), advertising, rent and real estate costs, transportation, etc.”
Per Wikipedia and (again) the Economist, as of 2013 a Big Mac cost 12% more in Australia than in the US. (That’s probably lower today, given the decline of the AUD against USD since 2013). So, applying the Big Mac index, in 2013 an Australian worker would have needed to earn 12% more than an American worker in order to enjoy a comparable standard of living with respect to Big Macs and other goods and services for which the Big Mac is a handy reference.
Updating these figures to the present time is left as an exercise for the student.
To clarify point #2 (as a Dane residing in Denmark for the last 10+ years), while there is no law specifically mandating a minimum wage, the nature of the Danish labour market and ubiquitous CBAs in every industry means there is a de facto minimum wage of roughly 20 USD. In fact, unions are so ingrained in the Danish labour market that any employer who refuses to draw up a CBA with employees faces boycott and public outrage. For all intents and purposes, it is impossible to pay your employees less than 20 USD/hr and conduct business in Denmark.
I don’t know about the earnings per hour, but in many countries medical insurance and vacation are required for all workers; unemployment benefits are available to anybody fired without cause. Denmark is one of them.
Most people in Europe and in quite a few Latin American countries wouldn’t believe that in the US it is possible to work legally without a contract and without any “benefits”. It’s a common cause of culture shock for H1B workers.
Don’t forget that in Denmark one of the “full benefits” will be free universal health coverage whether a person works or not. That isn’t something that McDonalds has to provide to their workers.
Good point about those frequently cited cost-of-living by city surveys. They may be useful for setting expense allowances for top executives but are otherwise inane. Bangkok, for example, is tied with Boston and Abu Dhabi in the survey. :smack: IIRC, the surveys are based on purchasing a basket which includes Marlboro cigarettes and Johnny Walker whiskey. Not domestic cigarettes and whiskey — the specific brands.
But the BigMac Index, while not as silly as the executive cost surveys, is also wrong-headed. McDonald’s, believe it or don’t, is often a venue for special occasions in Thailand. But just minutes ago I returned from the steak house in a nearby town where I splurged on a delicious and filling chicken steak lunch for $2.50, far better than anything at McDonald’s.
There are some sites I’m happy to turn off my ad-blocker to use.
And there are some news sources which, while of horrible quality and full of lies, I will click to pursue a specific claim.
But I won’t turn off my ad-blocker to read the one popular news site whose lies and propaganda consistently make FauxNews look almost mainstream by comparison. 
All the other sources shown in this thread show the $20 MacD pay, albeit not a “minimum wage,” to be correct. It seems safe to leave any Forbes lies unread.
That’s the de facto part.
I realize the job type availability is very different, but are “minimum wages” drastically different in Faroe and Greenland?
NB: they are *requesting *that you turn it off, but you can still continue to the article. Some other websites I’ve noticed lately require that you turn it off.
This site is a danish union information site about the McDonalds CBA
Minimum wage for an assistant over the age of 18 is 116 DKK, or 17.68 this morning according to Google. And the Forbes contributor is absolutely correct that this 116 DKK wouldn't buy as much in Denmark as 17.68 would by in the US. On the other hand the Forbes contributor fails to mention the socialised health care and higher education the Danish fast food worker doesn’t need to save up for.
For a worker under the age of 18 the minimum is a far more modest $ 10.76.
Sometimes you can. Sometimes you can’t. I’ve run into both situations on Forbes. The best chance is not to wait on the countdown or refresh the page, but go back and then click the link again.
Anyways, what it says is that you have to adjust the price down for equivalent purchasing power. It then claims the 110 krone may technically have an exchange value of $16.73 (confirmed using Google), but it has the purchasing power of about $11.70.
The problem with purchasing power equivalents, as already highlighted in this thread, is that what is “equivalent” depends on what you want to purchase. Your typical McDonald’s employee in the US may want to purchase different things from your typical McDonald’s employee in Denmark. A defensible comparison might be to look at the costs in each country of a diverse bunch of staple goods and services that unskilled or semi-skilled workers in both countries typically want or need to buy. But whether there’s a comparative purchasing power index around that is based on such a basket, I have no idea.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Goods and services are in general more expensive in the Scandinavian countries than in the US (with Denmark being at the cheaper end), partly because the minimum wage level is substantially higher. That’s reflected in the data and in the experience of people who’ve lived and travelled in both areas (me included).
But, as others already pointed out, the U.S. worker will have to pay for health insurance and many other things that the Danish worker will NOT have to pay for. IOW, even when there’s a glimmer of validity in a Forbes factoid, the factoid is still slanted, misconstrued and wrong.
Not only don’t I look at Forbes articles, but I view with suspicion any Doper so ignorant or right-wing as to click on (or post a link to :eek: ) a Forbes article.
We had one Audit-the-Fed YouTuber show up here a year ago or so, complaining that the FRB had loaned $15 trillion to American businesses. He got his factoid from Forbes … which counted a weekly $1 billion loan renewed 52 times (i.e. for one year) as $52 billion of lending. :smack:
Clicking a Forbes link on the off-chance there’s something useful there is like munching through dog turds hoping you luck out and find an undigested strawberry.
Another thing you have to consider when comparing employee wages in fast food across countries is the education level and productivity and reliability of Danish fast food employees vs. American fast food employees. In a country where 95% of people are high school graduates and 60% are college graduates, that gives McDonalds a much better pool of talent to hire from:
It also means they need a lot fewer people, as educated workers are going to be much more productive.
Some people like to point out that even if everyone had a great education we’d still need people to flip burgers and clean toilets. Quite true, but if everyone has a great education those jobs get done better, more efficiently, and people who do those jobs can get more money. The problem with the US is that we have a giant pool of unskilled and uneducated labor. Our low minimum wage is a symptom of that problem. A higher minimum wage wouldn’t cure it, it would just accelerate the trend to not use unskilled workers at all.