This is interesting, because it highlights the time-bomb of America’s stagnant and unliveable minimum wage. It should have kept pace with inflation but it didn’t, and now it’s too late to raise given COVID.

However Australia, where I live, our minimum wage is over $19/hr, and the actual “award wage” for most low paying jobs is actually more like $23–25/hr on weekdays and $33 on weekends. So the hospitality workers who lost their jobs, they got a similar level of assistance from the government that Americans did from their government BUT in the scheme of things, that’s enough to live on but smaller than what they would earn going back to work. So when jobs started coming back they went back to work.

But we’ve had a minimum wage like this for decades, so our economy can support it and all our businesses are used to paying it. America though, someone can work 40hrs a week at Walmart and not be able to afford rent and food in many cities. That’s crazy. A minimum wage should be at least liveable for someone working fulltime. It should never be lower than government assistance supposed to provide the BARE MINIMUM amount to live on. The fact that America is in such a bad way that actually government assistance IS better than minimum wage, is insane and shows what decades of bad monetary policy and crippling of unions has done.