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I just dont get it (or perhaps not able to digest it). Nurses and teachers are two of the most critical professions for a nation, nay a civilization. Yet we g

I just dont get it (or perhaps not able to digest it). Nurses and teachers are two of the most critical professions for a nation, nay a civilization. Yet we get away with what is essentially abuse with their treatment. How is this inversion of prioirity being gotten away with?

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Lack of consequences for those responsible for the decisions. Follow the incentives. If you want the workplace to improve, hold management responsible for their decisions.
MattGaiser 6y ago
They are critical to only a small group of people at any given time. That's part of the challenge. Eventually we all benefit from them, but at any given point they are out of sight and out of mind. That causes people to not really care.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
My wife's a respiratory therapist and she went through a similar experience. We have to remember though that the medical systems of parts of both China and Italy were overrun, leading to a spike in deaths because they couldn't get care, and we had no idea if it would happen in the US. Our goal with the lockdowns and everything else was to lower the maximum number of people in the hospital at any one time. Well the other end of that was to maximize hospital capacity. That necessitated maximizing labor and minimizing waste of things like masks which experienced global shortages. Note too that covid workers were highly compensated for their work, at least where I live. Our annual income doubled last year because of her work in the covid units. The issue isn't a financial one, but from dealing first-hand with so much death, suffering, and stress on a daily basis.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mywittyname 6y ago
They also tend to attract selfless people (usually women). And selfless people can get taken advantage of.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Indeed, it's often called Care Work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work Care workers hold crucial jobs but are often paid much less than other professions putting forth similar effort and similar amounts of training. Often, they're told that they do it for the love of their charges (whether it's nursing, teaching, social services), and most especially the completely unpaid child care at home. And yeah, most care work professions are associated with being "women's work".
de6u99er 6y ago
More critical positions are: - People working in energy and telecommunication - Food and water - Waste disposal Without all three of those sectors modern societies would collapse.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
i_haz_rabies 6y ago
Some meritocracy, eh? It blows my mind how the idea that compensation has anything at all to do with how important a job is or the quality of character it requires has survived this long.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  Do people commonly think that? It's all supply and demand, and very stochastic at that. Not to necessarily knock nurse pay, it is a common route to a middle and even upper-middle class life.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    Well to be fair the hospitals are the same people who have been complaining that they can't get enough qualified nursing staff for the past 15 or 20 years.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Yes, it's built right into our language: we say someone "earns" their wage.
  - nick_kline 6y ago
    Nurses and teachers are more important than me, a programmer. I was reminded of this when my state put me in the last vaccination group. Yet because of supply and demand, but also the potential for companies to earn from software and the vagaries of stock compensation, that programmers often can earn much more. I want all people to earn a living wage, especially those other "essential" but hopefully not continuing to be disposable workers in grocery stores and other underpaid jobs like food preparation and the people that take care of senior citizens - they need health insurance, a living wage, time off, respect. In other countries than the US it's much better for them, perhaps we'll get there during our current 'new new deal' phase in the US.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Yes, but we also have to price things for overall societal benefit. If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people. I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.
kps 6y ago
There's a pool of money to be split between front-line workers and adminstrators. Guess who decides how to split it?
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  Thee who make the system break the system..
jschwartzi 6y ago
It's probably related to the huge difference in how my wife and my mother are treated by "professionals" and contractors when I'm around versus when they're alone.
ryan93 6y ago
Is there specific evidence of abuse besides requiring masks. Surgeons routinely work much longer hours.
jariel 6y ago
Men commit suicide at about 3-4x the rate of women (it's not quite as high for attempts, men are better at 'getting it done'), often related to occupational issues but nobody seems to think one bit about them. [1] Education has by far one of the lowest suicide rates - of course, that's only one crude indirect measure of things. Jobs in education tend to be very stable, they are very highly regarded in the social sense (far more so than businessmen, politicians etc.) [2] In some places wages are not so good, but that's not always the case. Nurses are reasonably well comped but it's also impossible to quantify for some stress factors. Doctor's suicide rates are effectively the highest of any profession (note that for Healthcare as an 'industry' the numbers are lower, but for Doctor specifically, it's high, i.e. most of the industry are not dealing directly with trauma, death). Overall - I think COVID is obvious a giant bank of stress and generational PTSD and it's surprising how well the workers are taking it. Doctors and Nurses are some of the most professional and conscientious people out there, the least likely to complain i.e. and occupational sense of duty that transcends 'compensation'. COVID is a kind of war for them, it's just grinding them down. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm [2] https://moneywise.com/a/the-most-dishonest-profession https://moneywise.com/a/the-most-dishonest-profession [3] http://www.zeroattempts.org/suicide-professions.html http://www.zeroattempts.org/suicide-professions.html
ironman1478 6y ago
Because they are not the ones in power. The solution is to unionize. Teacher's unions seems to be unsuccessful as a whole (as an outsider at least). Nurses union's seem to be relatively successful in certain regions (the bay area seems like a good region. nurses make quite a bit of money here).
- BEEdwards 6y ago
  My wife was a nurse with Kaiser, a nonprofit with a union and she has very little positive to say about them.
  - ironman1478 6y ago
    Yeah I don't want to cast too wide of a net. My mom is a nurse in florida and isn't unionized and adjusting for cost of living, makes basically the same as a kaiser unionized nurse and has great job security. So it is not always necessary or they don't always work. But it seems like they are great for bringing the baseline work environment up.
- jariel 6y ago
  Teachers have some of the most powerful Unions in the world. The Ontario Teacher's Union might be the most powerful organization in Ontario. They own major league sports teams. Nurses salary in Bay Area is $133K, national average is $80K which is pretty good. [1] [1] https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-do-rns-earn-top-dollar/ https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-...
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    Anecdotally, my friends who teach in Canada seem to have significantly more structural influence than I do teaching in the US. I’m not sure the landscapes are comparable. Edit: they own major league sports teams? That’s wild.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Anecdotal counterpoint, I spent a lot of time in the hospital over the last year or so, and the vast majority of nurses that I spoke to were happy with their income and hours. I personally thought the 12 hour shifts would be a huge pain, but they all seemed to love the 3 day work week. Edit: The only nurse that seemed unhappy was an older agency nurse who was recently laid off from a hospital, and was having trouble finding steady work because she didn't have a four year degree. I wonder if the stress from changing standards is a factor.
germinalphrase 6y ago
As a high school teacher, one of the critical problems we have when arguing for higher pay is that there are no strong methods for quantifying teacher effectiveness. There have been attempts to develop such a tool (Gates poured a bunch of money into it), but nothing meaningful has been developed. Without that, we fall back on more qualitative, holistic methods they are both game-able and subjective. We may see a general cultural shift towards higher teacher pay (which I believe would be positive if paired with higher professional standards), but it’s difficult to argue in our current culture that teachers “deserve” more pay when we can’t even reliably determine which teachers are having an above average educational impact.
- anonporridge 6y ago
  It seems like as intractable a problem as trying to identify an objective measure for a human being's success in life.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > there are no strong methods for quantifying teacher effectiveness There is one: a free market. Private schools don't have the luxury of doing studies forever; if their teaching is not effective, they go out of business. The ones who stay in business have a direct, quantitative measure of the effectiveness of their teachers: profit.
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    “Parents believing the teachers are effective” is a measure of effectiveness, but I wouldn’t consider it a particularly rigorous one.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > I wouldn’t consider it a particularly rigorous one. Parents don't have to "believe" teachers are effective; they can see the results for themselves and judge them. My parents had no problem telling which of my teachers were actually teaching me things and which were just boring me to death in class. As for "rigorous", the whole point of the comment I responded to was that there are no "rigorous" third-party measures of teacher effectiveness. That's the "problem" that all these experts have been struggling unsuccessfully to solve for decades. The reason they can't solve it is that as they have conceived the "problem", it's not solvable. The people in a position to judge the effectiveness of teachers are the people who directly observe the impact of their teaching. Third-party "experts" can't do that.
dhosek 6y ago
It's a fundamental failure of capitalism and market economics that caring professions (such as nursing and teaching) will inherently be underpaid and undervalued. There's a pretty good discussion of this in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374533652/donhosek http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374533652/donhosek
jplr8922 6y ago
Very good question. Here are my hypothesis, feel free to punch me ; 1) Their unions are actually some form of inneficient brokers who fails to truly represent them politically and change the system in their favor. Instead, they simply take a cut on their paycheck, and treats them like factory workers while they should be treated as knowledge workers. Even if nurses and teachers are super important, we treat them like cogs in a machine and fail to frame their role as an investment in society. They are ''cost centers''. 2) The north american medical system (US and Canada) might differ in their funding, but are very similar in their organization compared to European models. Its all about the physician-patient relation, the former being all powerful and the later being a moron. In Canada, they are actually not employed by the state, but are in fact their own small businesses. Oh and they have de facto state monopoly on crucial medical tasks, making every other actor their economic bottom bitch. 3) A huge number of people who choose the job are very empathic-saviour types, and actually are professional martyrs who must endure poor working conditions to save others otherwise they would be bad.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Lack of consequences for those responsible for the decisions. Follow the incentives. If you want the workplace to improve, hold management responsible for their decisions.

MattGaiser 6y ago

They are critical to only a small group of people at any given time. That's part of the challenge. Eventually we all benefit from them, but at any given point they are out of sight and out of mind. That causes people to not really care.

TheAdamAndChe 6y ago

My wife's a respiratory therapist and she went through a similar experience. We have to remember though that the medical systems of parts of both China and Italy were overrun, leading to a spike in deaths because they couldn't get care, and we had no idea if it would happen in the US. Our goal with the lockdowns and everything else was to lower the maximum number of people in the hospital at any one time. Well the other end of that was to maximize hospital capacity. That necessitated maximizing labor and minimizing waste of things like masks which experienced global shortages. Note too that covid workers were highly compensated for their work, at least where I live. Our annual income doubled last year because of her work in the covid units. The issue isn't a financial one, but from dealing first-hand with so much death, suffering, and stress on a daily basis.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mywittyname 6y ago

They also tend to attract selfless people (usually women). And selfless people can get taken advantage of.

jfengel 6y ago
Indeed, it's often called Care Work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work Care workers hold crucial jobs but are often paid much less than other professions putting forth similar effort and similar amounts of training. Often, they're told that they do it for the love of their charges (whether it's nursing, teaching, social services), and most especially the completely unpaid child care at home. And yeah, most care work professions are associated with being "women's work".

de6u99er 6y ago

More critical positions are: - People working in energy and telecommunication - Food and water - Waste disposal Without all three of those sectors modern societies would collapse.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

i_haz_rabies 6y ago

Some meritocracy, eh? It blows my mind how the idea that compensation has anything at all to do with how important a job is or the quality of character it requires has survived this long.

whimsicalism 6y ago
Do people commonly think that? It's all supply and demand, and very stochastic at that. Not to necessarily knock nurse pay, it is a common route to a middle and even upper-middle class life.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Well to be fair the hospitals are the same people who have been complaining that they can't get enough qualified nursing staff for the past 15 or 20 years.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Yes, it's built right into our language: we say someone "earns" their wage.
- nick_kline 6y ago
  Nurses and teachers are more important than me, a programmer. I was reminded of this when my state put me in the last vaccination group. Yet because of supply and demand, but also the potential for companies to earn from software and the vagaries of stock compensation, that programmers often can earn much more. I want all people to earn a living wage, especially those other "essential" but hopefully not continuing to be disposable workers in grocery stores and other underpaid jobs like food preparation and the people that take care of senior citizens - they need health insurance, a living wage, time off, respect. In other countries than the US it's much better for them, perhaps we'll get there during our current 'new new deal' phase in the US.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    Yes, but we also have to price things for overall societal benefit. If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people. I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.

kps 6y ago

There's a pool of money to be split between front-line workers and adminstrators. Guess who decides how to split it?

PicassoCTs 6y ago
Thee who make the system break the system..

jschwartzi 6y ago

It's probably related to the huge difference in how my wife and my mother are treated by "professionals" and contractors when I'm around versus when they're alone.

ryan93 6y ago

Is there specific evidence of abuse besides requiring masks. Surgeons routinely work much longer hours.

jariel 6y ago

Men commit suicide at about 3-4x the rate of women (it's not quite as high for attempts, men are better at 'getting it done'), often related to occupational issues but nobody seems to think one bit about them. [1] Education has by far one of the lowest suicide rates - of course, that's only one crude indirect measure of things. Jobs in education tend to be very stable, they are very highly regarded in the social sense (far more so than businessmen, politicians etc.) [2] In some places wages are not so good, but that's not always the case. Nurses are reasonably well comped but it's also impossible to quantify for some stress factors. Doctor's suicide rates are effectively the highest of any profession (note that for Healthcare as an 'industry' the numbers are lower, but for Doctor specifically, it's high, i.e. most of the industry are not dealing directly with trauma, death). Overall - I think COVID is obvious a giant bank of stress and generational PTSD and it's surprising how well the workers are taking it. Doctors and Nurses are some of the most professional and conscientious people out there, the least likely to complain i.e. and occupational sense of duty that transcends 'compensation'. COVID is a kind of war for them, it's just grinding them down. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm [2] https://moneywise.com/a/the-most-dishonest-profession https://moneywise.com/a/the-most-dishonest-profession [3] http://www.zeroattempts.org/suicide-professions.html http://www.zeroattempts.org/suicide-professions.html

ironman1478 6y ago

Because they are not the ones in power. The solution is to unionize. Teacher's unions seems to be unsuccessful as a whole (as an outsider at least). Nurses union's seem to be relatively successful in certain regions (the bay area seems like a good region. nurses make quite a bit of money here).

BEEdwards 6y ago
My wife was a nurse with Kaiser, a nonprofit with a union and she has very little positive to say about them.
- ironman1478 6y ago
  Yeah I don't want to cast too wide of a net. My mom is a nurse in florida and isn't unionized and adjusting for cost of living, makes basically the same as a kaiser unionized nurse and has great job security. So it is not always necessary or they don't always work. But it seems like they are great for bringing the baseline work environment up.
jariel 6y ago
Teachers have some of the most powerful Unions in the world. The Ontario Teacher's Union might be the most powerful organization in Ontario. They own major league sports teams. Nurses salary in Bay Area is $133K, national average is $80K which is pretty good. [1] [1] https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-do-rns-earn-top-dollar/ https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-...
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  Anecdotally, my friends who teach in Canada seem to have significantly more structural influence than I do teaching in the US. I’m not sure the landscapes are comparable. Edit: they own major league sports teams? That’s wild.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

Anecdotal counterpoint, I spent a lot of time in the hospital over the last year or so, and the vast majority of nurses that I spoke to were happy with their income and hours. I personally thought the 12 hour shifts would be a huge pain, but they all seemed to love the 3 day work week. Edit: The only nurse that seemed unhappy was an older agency nurse who was recently laid off from a hospital, and was having trouble finding steady work because she didn't have a four year degree. I wonder if the stress from changing standards is a factor.

germinalphrase 6y ago

As a high school teacher, one of the critical problems we have when arguing for higher pay is that there are no strong methods for quantifying teacher effectiveness. There have been attempts to develop such a tool (Gates poured a bunch of money into it), but nothing meaningful has been developed. Without that, we fall back on more qualitative, holistic methods they are both game-able and subjective. We may see a general cultural shift towards higher teacher pay (which I believe would be positive if paired with higher professional standards), but it’s difficult to argue in our current culture that teachers “deserve” more pay when we can’t even reliably determine which teachers are having an above average educational impact.

anonporridge 6y ago
It seems like as intractable a problem as trying to identify an objective measure for a human being's success in life.
pdonis 6y ago
> there are no strong methods for quantifying teacher effectiveness There is one: a free market. Private schools don't have the luxury of doing studies forever; if their teaching is not effective, they go out of business. The ones who stay in business have a direct, quantitative measure of the effectiveness of their teachers: profit.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  “Parents believing the teachers are effective” is a measure of effectiveness, but I wouldn’t consider it a particularly rigorous one.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > I wouldn’t consider it a particularly rigorous one. Parents don't have to "believe" teachers are effective; they can see the results for themselves and judge them. My parents had no problem telling which of my teachers were actually teaching me things and which were just boring me to death in class. As for "rigorous", the whole point of the comment I responded to was that there are no "rigorous" third-party measures of teacher effectiveness. That's the "problem" that all these experts have been struggling unsuccessfully to solve for decades. The reason they can't solve it is that as they have conceived the "problem", it's not solvable. The people in a position to judge the effectiveness of teachers are the people who directly observe the impact of their teaching. Third-party "experts" can't do that.

dhosek 6y ago

It's a fundamental failure of capitalism and market economics that caring professions (such as nursing and teaching) will inherently be underpaid and undervalued. There's a pretty good discussion of this in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374533652/donhosek http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374533652/donhosek

jplr8922 6y ago

Very good question. Here are my hypothesis, feel free to punch me ; 1) Their unions are actually some form of inneficient brokers who fails to truly represent them politically and change the system in their favor. Instead, they simply take a cut on their paycheck, and treats them like factory workers while they should be treated as knowledge workers. Even if nurses and teachers are super important, we treat them like cogs in a machine and fail to frame their role as an investment in society. They are ''cost centers''. 2) The north american medical system (US and Canada) might differ in their funding, but are very similar in their organization compared to European models. Its all about the physician-patient relation, the former being all powerful and the later being a moron. In Canada, they are actually not employed by the state, but are in fact their own small businesses. Oh and they have de facto state monopoly on crucial medical tasks, making every other actor their economic bottom bitch. 3) A huge number of people who choose the job are very empathic-saviour types, and actually are professional martyrs who must endure poor working conditions to save others otherwise they would be bad.