Minimum-wage lessons for the U.S. from the other side of the world
Zahra Hossein Zadeh, a student who immigrated to Australia from Iran with her family in 2017, earns $19 an hour as a hotel housekeeper on weekends. “Honestly, I don’t have any financial problems,” she said. She can’t imagine life on $7.25 an hour, where the U.S. federal minimum wage stalled in 2009. “That’s really sad. Seven dollars? You can’t even buy your lunch for that.” As the United States debates the effects of raising the federal minimum wage, an instructive experience can be found across the Pacific. Australia has one of the world’s highest pay floors and relatively low unemployment, offering a case study in the modern economic theory that raising wages doesn’t kill jobs.
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