Is it possible that the relative strength of the EU per hour worked results from the fact that the low end jobs were made non-existent by regulation and people who work them in the US live off government handouts in the EU?
Anyone working in a full time job of any sort should be able to live without government assistance. The EU’s labour laws come much closer to that than American laws do.
Where?
Austria, Denmark, and Italy don't even have minimum wages...
Because construction, lawn care, and sweatshop jobs by immigrants is all registered in the US.
The “lack” of social system in the US that hides in the EU millions upon millions of people who don’t work for various reasons (ranging from not wanting to down to not being able to or not being employable) is definitely something that makes EU look better than it should. In many cases, they don’t even appear in the officially unemployed statistics, because they are so called social cases. At the same time, many of them also work “unofficially”, so they often end up earning more than honest people, while working much less.
Also, the jobs not captured by the "essential workers" also still exist in EU as the wealth scale of EU is very wide, with the lower end being significantly lower than the US lower end in terms of pay.
UK and US have equivalent unemployment rates but vastly different welfare systems. Germany is more generous than the UK but has lower unemployment. Southern Europe has higher unemployment, but welfare typically less generous than Northern Europe.
Low end jobs exist in the EU too — they just pay better than they do in the US. Low-end jobs that can be shifted in location (e.g. clothes production) have already left both US and EU. Low end jobs that need to be done in-country or are harder to offshore (cleaning, food factory work) remain in country (but perhaps eat into corporate profits, explaining the lower GINI coefficient of EU vs US.
That's a very strange idea about how the EU economy is...
People really thing we don't have tens of millions of people do "low end jobs"? What's the idea, that they were somehow automated by robots?
How would this work? Jobs were banned and no one does them? Are you saying that there are whole categories of work that just aren’t done in the EU?
What are these jobs?
Humans cleaning the roads/sidewalks every day would keep things a lot cleaner than the machine that only comes every few months. However again we can't pay someone an affordable wage to do that work so we compromise - the machine lets one human do the work of around 2000 humans with a broom, even at $1/day (which would be a good wage in India where they do hire humans to do this work) a modern machine is paid for by labor savings after half a year of operation, but it will run for 5 years or more. (the machine also needs fuel and maintenance which I didn't calculate.)
It's not anywhere near as common of a job in the US as in SE Asia, but it's not at all unheard of in larger cities.
Take a look at any list of billionaires from the US vs EU…