[JohnnyBrevo]

Not a welfare ranking. This measures one thing: hours of work to cover a small monthly essentials basket (rent, utilities, basic food, transport) = price ÷ wage. Healthcare/education/vacation are mostly outside that basket or already baked into hourly pay.

[Ethee]

So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.

There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.