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Perspective on Minimum Wage

During our first day in Cairns, I stopped at the local Friday’s Fish and Chipper Juice Bar to conduct an interview on minimum wage in Australia. Though it had not been my original plan for an interview topic, it unexpectedly ended up being a great connection to my first blog post on Asian Australian relations. My interviewee informed me that the minimum wage in Cairns is about $17.00 AUD (Australian Dollar), which I later looked up to be exactly $17.26 per hour. When asked, she said that she had yet to hear a lot of dialogue about any dissatisfaction with Australia’s minimum wage amounts—though she admitted to not knowing much about the conditions of areas outside of Cairns because she had only moved to Australia in the past couple of years. In fact, she told me that she was extremely happy with the wages she’s received in her time in Cairns, mostly because it was a large improvement over the minimum wage she was earning at her last place of residence. As it turns out, my interview subject is from South Korea, where she says she earned only the equivalent of $6.50 AUD per hour while doing the same—if not more—amount of work she currently did at this juice bar. I asked her if she would change anything about the minimum wage the Cairns area; she just thought quietly for a moment before looking up with a smile and saying, “No, nothing. I’m very happy.” This was such a cool and surprising connection to my first blog post in which I talked a lot about South Asian countries and the people that have migrated from them to Australia. Of course I wouldn’t have talked about it to begin with if it wasn’t a real cultural event, but nevertheless it was a really cool experience to talk to someone by chance who had done exactly what I talked about in my blog. 
            After my interview, I decided I needed to dig a little deeper to see if everyone in Australia is as happy with the minimum wage. Interestingly, the first article to pop up during my search was a comparison of Australian minimum wage to the minimum wage of the United States from an Australian news source. Reading the Australian perspective on American wages was interesting and almost confusing because of the very different financial conversations we have in America. In this 2016 article, reporter Matt Young said “It’s been a long fight for the underprivileged across America, but most notably, the fight for a respectful minimum wage…It’s an extreme case, but not unfamiliar. Across the United States, the July 2015 minimum average wage was a measly $7.25/hour” (Young). It also compared these numbers to other countries, including the United Kingdom, China, Canada, South Korea, India and Mexico, out of which Australia was by far the highest, exceeding the United Kingdom by $7.00 AUD. Another web article opened with the declaration: “What's the minimum wage in Australia? It's talked about often enough – one of the things we pride ourselves on compared with those miserable Americans” (). Such strong reaction by Australian reporters, especially reactions that directly attack the U.S. approach to minimum wage is really humbling, forcing me to reconsider how American’s have been approaching the issue of poverty and minimum wage in our country, as well as forcing me to be more open minded as I analyze the values and mentalities of my country and others.

 -Ellen McDaniel
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