The 2014 Sochi Winter Games are being hosted by Russia a scant 24 kilometres northwest of the Georgian border on the Black Sea, but the gulf between how much it costs workers in each country to buy a beer is as wide as an ocean.
A story published Friday morning in Quartz miraculously finds the intersection between Sochi, minimum wages and beer; calculating how long it would take minimum wage earners to scratch together enough dough for a pint.
READ MORE: Where do you set the minimum wage?
In Russia, it requires 1.6 hours or 96 minutes to scratch together enough rubles to buy a beer, by far the longest stretch of time in Europe (if one considers Russia as part of the continent).
But that amount of time is far – far – better than how long it would take a min-wage worker in Georgia to do the same.
Just across the border from Sochi, minimum wage workers would have to work 15.1 hours, according to Quartz, longer than in Bangladesh or Afghanistan, the website says.
Russia’s minimum wage is just under a $1/hour (U.S.), according to experts at ConvergEx Group.
In Canada – thankfully – it only requires about 40 minutes of work to accomplish the task (using 2011 minimum wages of $9.75/hour). Topping the list is Puerto Rico, where it takes just 14 minutes to earn a beer.
See the Quartz story here.
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