This is the key sentence in the article:
>However, 90% of Swiss workers earn well above the proposed minimum and are already among the highest paid in the world.
>However, 90% of Swiss workers earn well above the proposed minimum and are already among the highest paid in the world.
The US isn't a poor country either. In fact, Americans are also among the highest paid in the world [1]. It's just not evenly distributed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
Imho lower salaries doesn't create more jobs it just creates more desperate people willing to work for lower salaries because of its downward loop.
I know this opinion is not popular in the states. But this has nothing to do with socialism. Socialism is about common ownership, common management. Minimum salaries is about raising the middle class.
What this is likely to do is to displace immigrants working illegally with citizens working legally.
Imagine what would happen to California unemployment if all the agribusinesses suddenly had to pay a real minimum wage. Illegal immigration would get almost completely displaced with actual citizens willing to do the work now that there was a reasonable wage behind it.
Even if there were illegal immigrants being displaced, where would the supply of legal labor come from, suddenly? Certainly not from the jobless. It's simply an illusion that people on a broad scale would choose unemployment because of low wages...
Also, the opinion about immigrants in Switzerland seems to be very complicated. People seem to both feel "We have to much immigration", but they don't want to get rid of the immigrants they know and depend on. For that matter, they think there are too many Germans in Switzerland, on the other hand their economy extremely depends on those immigrants.
The government will be hard pressed to find enough immigrants they can get rid of without serious consequences and even antagonizing those voters who voted for the restrictions in the first place.
I'm not an opponent of a sensible minimum wage legislation, but I'm not kidding myself over the consequences. In Switzerland I highly doubt if minimum wage is doing anything good...
The effect of raising minimum wage will highly depend on what level it is raised to and how strong the local economy is.
Just stating a data point and then offering a generic platitude (things depend on things) isn't making a substantive contribution.
Everything there is extremely expensive because of the higher salaries. Which would make it impossible to live there with a lower income.
Your statement: lower salaries doesn't create more jobs is false through my point of view. I live in Belgium and a lot of multinationals don't ever consider Belgium because of the high taxes (= which create higher salaries, but only the governement is taking the biggest portion). Our politicians try to compensate this by heavily subsidizing multinationals (which create 1000's of jobs in a snap, while heavily taxing the SMB's at the same time), which isn't the way to go.
PS. Switzerland tries to introduce immgration quotas, which would be illegal as member of the EU : http://goo.gl/xBmX12 (is an example of their protectionism)
PS 2. High taxes in Belgium isn't the only reason why multinations neglect us, but it's an important one :)
How does artificially increasing the price of something make the market more likely to clear?
This is not actually true. Companies only hire when then they have demand.