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I don't disagree nurses DESERVE to be paid more (I'm not sure if the economics bear out but they're certainly as WORTHY as many other professions), but wouldn't

I don't disagree nurses DESERVE to be paid more (I'm not sure if the economics bear out but they're certainly as WORTHY as many other professions), but wouldn't the fact that these nurses continue to work in nursing despite considering leaving bolster the argument even further that they are receiving adequate compensation? Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have. Leaving when you want to stay, to me, would be a much bigger indicator that nurses who want to stay in the profession can't because of wage/benefits/conditions issues.

landemva 5y ago
Many can't afford to not work due to debt/rent/child support payments. If you don't pay rent you lose the apartment and the weekend parenting time. Miss the child support payments which were being taken from paycheck and child support enforcement takes driver license and starts process to take the car that is in your name. Many people don't have even a little optionality.
- notch656a 5y ago
  That's actually my point. IF they are able to meet their obligations in nursing and their job is literally such a superior option to all the alternatives that they don't have 'optionality' then it's a weird flex to be angry at your one best(least bad) option that actually pays your rent and child support. Be angry that the alternatives aren't as good as the nursing gig you have. I definitely feel for those paying child support, because 'imputed income' means you must pay at whatever rate the judge thinks you can make the best money at. You can never take a more relaxing lower paying job, because it will result in your imprisonment. Those people really have no future in the US -- their only option to throttle back their income is suicide, leave the country, or wait to go to jail. I blame society for the existence of these debtor's prisons, not nursing employers.
  - landemva 5y ago
    Seems you understand the more income -> more support trap. Mandatory overtime is considered in support calculations. That sets high water mark so going back to 40/hours week does not lower payments. I learned the hard way, and last employer I regularly sent email to boss thanking them for opportunity to work voluntary overtime. I would subpoena the boss's response of 'yes' for evidence in child support hearing to only use 40/hours week. The courts and county child support enforcement are wicked and liars.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      Yes that never made the slightest sense to me. As someone married with a kid, when I get a raise or bonus it goes to my retirement -- not as a change in quality of life for a child who already has food/shelter/education. The kid still gets the same amount now as when I made significantly less. The idea that a kid needs more money because you worked overtime is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. At best it's simply backdoor alimony.
      - RHSeeger 5y ago
        But the counter to that is, just because you work a minimum wage job and can't afford much child support, doesn't mean that what you can afford is enough to raise the child well. I expect it's very hard to say "the child needs _this_ much in order to be raised well" and then scale up from 0 to that amount as the parent makes more money. But you also can't just decide how much the child needs and then make the parent pay that much no matter how much they make. So the compromise is to base the amount paid on the amount the parent makes, and not really cap it. This has the benefit of allowing low earning parents to pay less, at the cost of high earning parents paying more (than is really needed).
        notch656a 5y ago
        >But you also can't just decide how much the child needs and then make the parent pay that much no matter how much they make. This is basically how it works when you're married, though, at least in my family. Whether I'm unemployed or my work life is booming, the child cost the same for me as when I'm not. During bad times I liquidate my engineering tools / spend from savings / go into debt / sell my vehicle to take care of my kid if needed. On the flip side during the good times the extra money goes into investments and retirement. The amount I need to take care of the kid is fixed, with the amount I spend having virtually nothing to do with the amount I make. My level of personal real spending has changed very little since I got my first near minimum wage job after leaving home at 18; and definitely not linearly with my salary (at best I eat out more now, but that's because I'm busier making money). When the kid came they've always been a relatively fixed cost -- or at least unaffected by our salaries. My kid would not be effected the slightest, better or worse, for my wage unless I was stuck below ~$12/hr for an extended time, so maybe it would make more sense to take a variable amount up to say $12/hr and then just a fixed price after that. >doesn't mean that what you can afford is enough to raise the child well Really depends. Some children grow up in situations where money is scarce but nonetheless have fulfilling childhoods that lead them towards success. It's also worth noting parents who can provide other things in lieu of money -- such as a homestead where they grow their own food and build their own house is perfectly acceptable in a marriage but somehow not acceptable as part of child support enforcement. It doesn't make sense. >This has the benefit of allowing low earning parents to pay less Again this is an odd choice. When I am making nothing, I still contribute half to the family costs. When I'm making 6 figures, my half stays the same. Both my wife and I have a deal where we pay half the costs. That way there is no resentment that someone is paying more just because they make more. It happens to be my wife makes significantly more money than me, but we still pay 50/50 costs of child and other bills with the remainder going into our own unshared accounts. It would be extraordinarily selfish and greedy of me for me to demand my wife to pay more simply because she makes more money, yet if we divorced this is precisely what the judge would order in many states. No matter how nasty the divorce I would simply return her share of her savings along with anything over half for spending of the child -- to not do so would make me a vile and greedy person who cowardly uses the violence of the state to unjustly take from others. In our case the cost of the child is about 6-8% of our current salaries; so as you can see from child support calculators, about half of the money calculated by child support worksheets would be entirely for the lolz of the judge. >So the compromise is to base the amount paid on the amount the parent makes Unfortunately this isn't how it works, as above alluded. Once you make a certain amount it becomes your 'imputed income'. Once you set the precedent you can earn a maximum, the judge expects that to be your income you're capable of. You pay based on that higher amount whether you relax back to a lower paying job or not. In this way you're set up into a trap where if you try to get a higher paying job to save up to pay off years of child support, you're stuck in an even more fucked position and meanwhile if your kid is like mine and has a relatively fixed cost then the rest is bled off as backdoor alimony as a reward to your ex-spouse for divorcing you.
Sakos 5y ago
Are you familiar with the US? I don't see how you can in good faith argue that if people don't like what they have to do and/or what they get paid for it, they can just go do something else.
- scaramanga 5y ago
  There's also the consideration that nurses don't leave, because they can see that patient care standards are not good, and they worry that if they leave, their colleagues will be forced take up the slack, employers won't replace them (since the colleagues took up the slack), and they will reward themselves for having found a way to "improve efficiency." There are, of course, onlookers who are unable to even perceive the moral dimensions that normal human beings take for granted. Perhaps they were beamed down from the mothership just yesterday? The prevalence of psychopathy among human beings cannot be as high as it would appear from the average internet message-board, can it?
ayngg 5y ago
I am not really specifically making an argument on their salaries, I guess I am saying that Nurses are in the position where they have the least leverage in the system so they end up bearing a lot of the responsibilities that should be held elsewhere while having a disproportionate amount of resources allocated to them. In healthcare I get the feeling that a lot of workers feel stuck in that there are many patients and people depending on them, and to leave would sort of be like abandoning them while increasing the burden on ex-cowoerkers.
pojzon 5y ago
Most of those ppl cannot leave due to various obligations. If you want to see an indocator of terrible compensation - check why pretty much noone (at least here) wants to be a nurse. Profession is rapidly aging because new ppl are not joining. And they are not joining because work is hard and pay is terrible. The whole Healthcare system if we dont get robots in place fast is going to crumble soon like a house of cards.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The US has lots of people interested in nursing and not enough infrastructure to turn them into nurses: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/25/1047290034/the-u-s-needs-more-nurses-but-nursing-schools-have-too-few-slots https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/25/1047290... The work is hard, but the pay is well above many other jobs and there are jobs everywhere.
  - pojzon 5y ago
    Im in Eastern Europe so situation here is complete opposite. + emigration of nurses to Germany
tetraca 5y ago
> Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have. Leaving when you want to stay, to me, would be a much bigger indicator that nurses who want to stay in the profession can't because of wage/benefits/conditions issues. I think the conclusion of this sort of economic thinking is basically: Give your employees just enough money that they can keep they keep their head above the water but not enough to flourish, and just enough pressure/responsibility that they don't have energy to do anything else, but not too much that they have a complete mental breakdown that leaves them with the conclusion that they should leave your industry at any cost. When you spent a lot of time and money into a specialized and demanding career, I imagine it practically very difficult to actually change your career, even if it's killing you. It's probably even worse if you have familial obligations. You likely do not have time or energy to better your situation after hours, and if you quit, you potentially resign yourself (perhaps) to many years of destitution while you accumulate the necessary knowledge to do something else. I would not be surprised if many people just bear bad conditions because the cost to do anything else worth one's time is simply too high.
- nradov 5y ago
  Employers are going to pay the minimum wages they can in order to retain sufficient workers. They obviously aren't going to voluntarily pay extra just so that employees can flourish. There are a lot of jobs openings available to someone with an RN certificate and some experience. Unemployment in that group is close to zero. They don't all work in direct patient care roles.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - scaramanga 5y ago
    It looks like you accidentally "did a communism" by arguing for nationalizing health and putting patient-care considerations above market considerations :)
    - 5y ago
alexashka 5y ago
That's not how the real world works. People don't 'switch careers' when they've spent years getting good at it. What they do instead is sit around posting on HackerNews and fucking the dog in all sorts of other ways. Do you realize the irony of it all? This place gets like 1/10th the traffic on weekends. That's not a coincidence.
scaramanga 5y ago
Well it depends what you think the purpose of economies is. One idea is that human beings are just a type of animal, and the economy is a social system which is supposed to incentivize the kind of behaviours that you want humans to do. If you want humans to be nurses, then the economy had better reward that. Another interpretation is that the economy is a tool for exploiting people. For example, human beings are inherently of the opinion that human decency is good, they want to be functioning members of society, they care about the wellbeing of others, and if they are paid crap and treated like garbage, they will endure that, even to the point of great personal cost, emotional distress, mental illness, alcoholism, and even death. But as long as they don't quit, then everything is fine.
cleandreams 5y ago
America is full of terrible jobs now. Just terrible. There has been a degradation of job quality with outsourcing, amazon, you name it. This may be why nurses don't leave.
- Tozen 5y ago
  But hasn't that always been the case, where 80% of the jobs were unsatisfactory in some way or another. Be it pay, conditions, co-workers, management/boss, hours, commute time, etc... Not just America, but most industrialized countries.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  >America is full of terrible jobs now. At what point in time did America have better jobs? A lot of people may reference the glory days of 70s and 80s manufacturing, but those jobs went from bad to good with the power of unionization. There was no free lunch.
zamfi 5y ago
> Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have Not necessarily. The "transaction costs" of switching careers are huge. If you want to make comparable money to nursing, you probably need training in something else, which likely requires a period of low or no income, possibly years of schooling or other training, etc. It's hard to switch careers after 30 -- not always impossible, but certainly hard to revert back to the lifestyle of a 20-something for some time. People may stick it out despite unhappiness. Doesn't mean compensation is adequate.

landemva 5y ago

Many can't afford to not work due to debt/rent/child support payments. If you don't pay rent you lose the apartment and the weekend parenting time. Miss the child support payments which were being taken from paycheck and child support enforcement takes driver license and starts process to take the car that is in your name. Many people don't have even a little optionality.

notch656a 5y ago
That's actually my point. IF they are able to meet their obligations in nursing and their job is literally such a superior option to all the alternatives that they don't have 'optionality' then it's a weird flex to be angry at your one best(least bad) option that actually pays your rent and child support. Be angry that the alternatives aren't as good as the nursing gig you have. I definitely feel for those paying child support, because 'imputed income' means you must pay at whatever rate the judge thinks you can make the best money at. You can never take a more relaxing lower paying job, because it will result in your imprisonment. Those people really have no future in the US -- their only option to throttle back their income is suicide, leave the country, or wait to go to jail. I blame society for the existence of these debtor's prisons, not nursing employers.
- landemva 5y ago
  Seems you understand the more income -> more support trap. Mandatory overtime is considered in support calculations. That sets high water mark so going back to 40/hours week does not lower payments. I learned the hard way, and last employer I regularly sent email to boss thanking them for opportunity to work voluntary overtime. I would subpoena the boss's response of 'yes' for evidence in child support hearing to only use 40/hours week. The courts and county child support enforcement are wicked and liars.
  - notch656a 5y ago
    Yes that never made the slightest sense to me. As someone married with a kid, when I get a raise or bonus it goes to my retirement -- not as a change in quality of life for a child who already has food/shelter/education. The kid still gets the same amount now as when I made significantly less. The idea that a kid needs more money because you worked overtime is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. At best it's simply backdoor alimony.
    - RHSeeger 5y ago
      But the counter to that is, just because you work a minimum wage job and can't afford much child support, doesn't mean that what you can afford is enough to raise the child well. I expect it's very hard to say "the child needs _this_ much in order to be raised well" and then scale up from 0 to that amount as the parent makes more money. But you also can't just decide how much the child needs and then make the parent pay that much no matter how much they make. So the compromise is to base the amount paid on the amount the parent makes, and not really cap it. This has the benefit of allowing low earning parents to pay less, at the cost of high earning parents paying more (than is really needed).
      - notch656a 5y ago
        >But you also can't just decide how much the child needs and then make the parent pay that much no matter how much they make. This is basically how it works when you're married, though, at least in my family. Whether I'm unemployed or my work life is booming, the child cost the same for me as when I'm not. During bad times I liquidate my engineering tools / spend from savings / go into debt / sell my vehicle to take care of my kid if needed. On the flip side during the good times the extra money goes into investments and retirement. The amount I need to take care of the kid is fixed, with the amount I spend having virtually nothing to do with the amount I make. My level of personal real spending has changed very little since I got my first near minimum wage job after leaving home at 18; and definitely not linearly with my salary (at best I eat out more now, but that's because I'm busier making money). When the kid came they've always been a relatively fixed cost -- or at least unaffected by our salaries. My kid would not be effected the slightest, better or worse, for my wage unless I was stuck below ~$12/hr for an extended time, so maybe it would make more sense to take a variable amount up to say $12/hr and then just a fixed price after that. >doesn't mean that what you can afford is enough to raise the child well Really depends. Some children grow up in situations where money is scarce but nonetheless have fulfilling childhoods that lead them towards success. It's also worth noting parents who can provide other things in lieu of money -- such as a homestead where they grow their own food and build their own house is perfectly acceptable in a marriage but somehow not acceptable as part of child support enforcement. It doesn't make sense. >This has the benefit of allowing low earning parents to pay less Again this is an odd choice. When I am making nothing, I still contribute half to the family costs. When I'm making 6 figures, my half stays the same. Both my wife and I have a deal where we pay half the costs. That way there is no resentment that someone is paying more just because they make more. It happens to be my wife makes significantly more money than me, but we still pay 50/50 costs of child and other bills with the remainder going into our own unshared accounts. It would be extraordinarily selfish and greedy of me for me to demand my wife to pay more simply because she makes more money, yet if we divorced this is precisely what the judge would order in many states. No matter how nasty the divorce I would simply return her share of her savings along with anything over half for spending of the child -- to not do so would make me a vile and greedy person who cowardly uses the violence of the state to unjustly take from others. In our case the cost of the child is about 6-8% of our current salaries; so as you can see from child support calculators, about half of the money calculated by child support worksheets would be entirely for the lolz of the judge. >So the compromise is to base the amount paid on the amount the parent makes Unfortunately this isn't how it works, as above alluded. Once you make a certain amount it becomes your 'imputed income'. Once you set the precedent you can earn a maximum, the judge expects that to be your income you're capable of. You pay based on that higher amount whether you relax back to a lower paying job or not. In this way you're set up into a trap where if you try to get a higher paying job to save up to pay off years of child support, you're stuck in an even more fucked position and meanwhile if your kid is like mine and has a relatively fixed cost then the rest is bled off as backdoor alimony as a reward to your ex-spouse for divorcing you.

Sakos 5y ago

Are you familiar with the US? I don't see how you can in good faith argue that if people don't like what they have to do and/or what they get paid for it, they can just go do something else.

scaramanga 5y ago
There's also the consideration that nurses don't leave, because they can see that patient care standards are not good, and they worry that if they leave, their colleagues will be forced take up the slack, employers won't replace them (since the colleagues took up the slack), and they will reward themselves for having found a way to "improve efficiency." There are, of course, onlookers who are unable to even perceive the moral dimensions that normal human beings take for granted. Perhaps they were beamed down from the mothership just yesterday? The prevalence of psychopathy among human beings cannot be as high as it would appear from the average internet message-board, can it?

ayngg 5y ago

I am not really specifically making an argument on their salaries, I guess I am saying that Nurses are in the position where they have the least leverage in the system so they end up bearing a lot of the responsibilities that should be held elsewhere while having a disproportionate amount of resources allocated to them. In healthcare I get the feeling that a lot of workers feel stuck in that there are many patients and people depending on them, and to leave would sort of be like abandoning them while increasing the burden on ex-cowoerkers.

pojzon 5y ago

Most of those ppl cannot leave due to various obligations. If you want to see an indocator of terrible compensation - check why pretty much noone (at least here) wants to be a nurse. Profession is rapidly aging because new ppl are not joining. And they are not joining because work is hard and pay is terrible. The whole Healthcare system if we dont get robots in place fast is going to crumble soon like a house of cards.

maxerickson 5y ago
The US has lots of people interested in nursing and not enough infrastructure to turn them into nurses: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/25/1047290034/the-u-s-needs-more-nurses-but-nursing-schools-have-too-few-slots https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/25/1047290... The work is hard, but the pay is well above many other jobs and there are jobs everywhere.
- pojzon 5y ago
  Im in Eastern Europe so situation here is complete opposite. + emigration of nurses to Germany

tetraca 5y ago

> Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have. Leaving when you want to stay, to me, would be a much bigger indicator that nurses who want to stay in the profession can't because of wage/benefits/conditions issues. I think the conclusion of this sort of economic thinking is basically: Give your employees just enough money that they can keep they keep their head above the water but not enough to flourish, and just enough pressure/responsibility that they don't have energy to do anything else, but not too much that they have a complete mental breakdown that leaves them with the conclusion that they should leave your industry at any cost. When you spent a lot of time and money into a specialized and demanding career, I imagine it practically very difficult to actually change your career, even if it's killing you. It's probably even worse if you have familial obligations. You likely do not have time or energy to better your situation after hours, and if you quit, you potentially resign yourself (perhaps) to many years of destitution while you accumulate the necessary knowledge to do something else. I would not be surprised if many people just bear bad conditions because the cost to do anything else worth one's time is simply too high.

nradov 5y ago
Employers are going to pay the minimum wages they can in order to retain sufficient workers. They obviously aren't going to voluntarily pay extra just so that employees can flourish. There are a lot of jobs openings available to someone with an RN certificate and some experience. Unemployment in that group is close to zero. They don't all work in direct patient care roles.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- scaramanga 5y ago
  It looks like you accidentally "did a communism" by arguing for nationalizing health and putting patient-care considerations above market considerations :)
  - 5y ago

alexashka 5y ago

That's not how the real world works. People don't 'switch careers' when they've spent years getting good at it. What they do instead is sit around posting on HackerNews and fucking the dog in all sorts of other ways. Do you realize the irony of it all? This place gets like 1/10th the traffic on weekends. That's not a coincidence.

scaramanga 5y ago

Well it depends what you think the purpose of economies is. One idea is that human beings are just a type of animal, and the economy is a social system which is supposed to incentivize the kind of behaviours that you want humans to do. If you want humans to be nurses, then the economy had better reward that. Another interpretation is that the economy is a tool for exploiting people. For example, human beings are inherently of the opinion that human decency is good, they want to be functioning members of society, they care about the wellbeing of others, and if they are paid crap and treated like garbage, they will endure that, even to the point of great personal cost, emotional distress, mental illness, alcoholism, and even death. But as long as they don't quit, then everything is fine.

cleandreams 5y ago

America is full of terrible jobs now. Just terrible. There has been a degradation of job quality with outsourcing, amazon, you name it. This may be why nurses don't leave.

Tozen 5y ago
But hasn't that always been the case, where 80% of the jobs were unsatisfactory in some way or another. Be it pay, conditions, co-workers, management/boss, hours, commute time, etc... Not just America, but most industrialized countries.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>America is full of terrible jobs now. At what point in time did America have better jobs? A lot of people may reference the glory days of 70s and 80s manufacturing, but those jobs went from bad to good with the power of unionization. There was no free lunch.

zamfi 5y ago

> Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have Not necessarily. The "transaction costs" of switching careers are huge. If you want to make comparable money to nursing, you probably need training in something else, which likely requires a period of low or no income, possibly years of schooling or other training, etc. It's hard to switch careers after 30 -- not always impossible, but certainly hard to revert back to the lifestyle of a 20-something for some time. People may stick it out despite unhappiness. Doesn't mean compensation is adequate.