It would be interesting to see data on this by state. Nursing, unfortunately, is much more difficult in states without unions. In California, the strong nurses union has ensured somewhat better staffing ratios and much better pay than in other states.
why doesn't collective bargaining work in this scenario? if the demand for nurse labor is so incredibly high, they should have a lot more bargaining power, no?
That's great news. I know quite a few nurses where I live, and they are being fed the anti-union propaganda from their employers. The hospital industry around here is getting nervous, they have been quite comfortable for a while. Unfortunately, the nurses don't seem to want the union, even though it will practically double their wages overnight.
https://medcitynews.com/2023/07/pandemic-nurse-labor-union-w... ("Nurse unions and labor experts agree that the pandemic was a turning point that catalyzed nurses to fight for improved working conditions and overall better treatment from their employers. By negotiating new contracts with their employers, unions are working hard to both uphold patient safety and mitigate the nursing field’s debilitating workforce shortage.")
It seems like your comment would be better directed towards weak or absent nurse unions, instead of individuals. I had countless nurse and physician friends go to their hospital directors/HR/managers during the pandemic "I need a raise because I have absorbed the load of 3 other workers and am working harder than ever." Not only were they refused, many instead received 10-33% pay cuts, with hospitals citing increased Opex costs despite decreased staffing, significant government assistance, and increased volunteer (0-cost) help.
It'd also be enlightening for people in this thread to have hospital executives explain how they have some of the highest patient numbers in history yet they're hemorrhaging so much money their physicians had to take pay cuts.
Nurses, due to their profession having relatively low barriers to entry yet requiring years of operational knowledge to truly be effective, need collective bargaining. Nurses do strike, and nurse strikes are actively occurring on the U.S. West Coast. However, the unions they represent are small and have little power overall. For a strike to be successful you need solidarity from a majority of workers in the area you want to impact. You also need buy-in from the hospital/region that union nurses will provide superior care to non-union nurses. Something that's hard to do when your average executive thinks that the most complicated thing a nurse does is sticking a patient.
A couple changes I've heard from nurses would be helpful:
1. Safe mandated staffing ratios. California is one that does this and many nurses seem happy with the ratios.
2. Safe harbor laws. If the nurse feels they are pushed into a risky situation, they should have a right to notify management which will take on liability if they do not resolve it. A few states have this but hospitals bully nurses not to invoking it.
3. Better pay for the liability they take. Unlike management, they could go to prison for mistakes they make. There was a recent case nurses were outraged about.
4. Unions are beneficial. In California the nurses union is pretty strong to negotiate better terms and conditions.
Yea, but we are starting to see upcoming issues with nurses in the US where some places just don't have enough. Granted, this is more because hospitals are trying to keep their number of nurses as low as possible. The hospital my wife works at, they suppress the number of nurses when they in fact need more and just hire travel nurses on demand. Then they complain that travel nurses cost too much. I don't think pay is the only factor here. Nurses get paid great by hospitals, but also still get treated like shit. My wife doesn't even get bathroom breaks during her 12 shift and most of the time no lunch break because there is never a nurse available to cover for a 30 minute lunch or a 5 minute bathroom break.
My fiancee is a nurse. Conditions are absolute shit, especially in states where the patient to nurse ratio isn't legally protected.
I think that the Great Resignation is even more obvious in nursing because of nursing contracts. Nurse contracting became really popular when the pandemic started because the hospitals were overwhelmed and contracts were ridiculously lucrative.
Hospital management is always so short sighted that they just don't want to raise the pay of their core stuff. Core staff is paid on average $35/hour. Nursing contracts start at $60 and can go much higher. This has lead to the situation where the core staff resigns en masse and goes to work as a contractor (sometimes even at the same hospital).
The hospital where my fiancee is contracting now has literally 0 core nursing staff left. There is not a single full time nurse employed in the whole hospital. Problem is that the contractors leave after ~3 months and go look for a more high paying contract so they are rarely at the same hospital for a long time.
The result is that you don't have a single nurse in the hospital that actually knows that hospital's procedures, doctors, people to call, storage lockers, and all of that institutional knowledge that you need to have to be effective.
I would agree with you, but my gf is a unionized respiratory therapist.
Not only are her colleagues and managers extremely mean and unprofessional to her, the hospital executives are actively training the non-union nurses to replace the union respiratory therapists, because "cost".
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