On many employment issues, including minimim wage, nations in the European Union differ vastly. For instance, many EU countries have no minimim wage laws, and while some nations do, the differences between countries are massive. Some countries are interested in introducing minimum wage laws to protect the wages of their nonunion workers from employees willing to work for less. This is mainly a problem that countries in the West face from workers coming from newly-Democratic Eastern European countries.
See "The Workplace: In the EU, stark wage disparity", Thomas Fuller, International Herald Tribune, October 24, 2005