Notice how nurses, EMTs, and teachers are among the professions that are both vital to society and treated like crap? Oh to be a coddled member of the ownership class!
The problem was not created by the nurses, and it is not their responsibility to address it. If there is chronic underfunding and/or understaffing, the politicians and the filthy rich people in charge are the ones responsible and they are the ones who need to fix it.
Don’t put the blame and responsibility on average people just trying to live their lives.
This happens a lot in nursing. Administrators guilt nursing staff into longer shifts and poor nurse to patient ratios instead of fixing the underlying problems. Then when nurses leave the job or refuse to take on extra time, management blames those who are standing up for themselves for the shortage, high ratios, and dumping on existing staff. Also, depending on your jurisdiction a nurse who leaves without a replacement can be charged with abandonment.
If it’s anything like in the US, during Covid, it was a rush to pump out new nursing students. These nursing students were paid incredibly well, they were overstaffed and underworked. Now that Covid is over and they’re actually expected to do the job for the real salary, which is still really good usually, they’re all quitting. At the hospital I know there was one particular nurse that was able to game the overtime system and she made $350,000 USD in a single year. She ended up quitting when she couldn’t game it anymore.
Of for sure. But if you could legally double your salary with a few planned decisions like clocking in a little early and a little late…. Wouldn’t you?
Regardless of her own personal choices, The management of the hospital really should have fixed their time clock and fixed their overtime policy long before anybody figured out how to abuse it. But, those policies were left over from Covid when they were just happy to have staffing.
It’s legal. Technically they threw out all policy about overtime during Covid. She didn’t steal anything. She just made sure to have over a certain number of house of overtime so that her final shift would push over a certain amount and she’d get double time for the entire shift and then she would stay over like 3 hours. She’d do this every week. And with the overtime rates at the time she was getting like $200/hr.
It kinda sucks for the other nurses though, because she put that floor wwaaaayyy over budget and they (the floor manager) got hit for it, which trickles down.
Quite a number of the nurses were taking advantage of the situation, but none of them like that. No one really cares if you grab an hour or two extra a week. Even if all you do is run some meds, they have the money.
Taking a job that someone is offering a market-rate salary for is not “gaming the system”. Them getting a good wage shouldn’t make you upset. The fact that your boss pays you peanuts should make you upset. Don’t be a crab in a bucket. Fight for better wages for yourself and the people around you.
Am I allowed to get upset at police officers abusing overtime with no oversight in order to make absurd amounts of money while doing essentially nothing, or is that also class betrayal?
This isn’t relevant to our original conversation, but yes.
Cops are class traitors that are essentially above the law. They issue fines that are a flat fee (rather than scaling % of wealth) so it only negatively impacts poor people.
Cops also abuse their power with the public having little recourse. Did the cop shoot your dog for no reason? You could sue them, but the money won’t come from the asshole cop, it’ll come from taxpayers and the cop will get a paid vacation.
Only if the reason they are using so much over time has nothing to do with under staffing, and too much work load, making it necessary. When it’s a problem generated by by cutting too many corners, the problem is greed, not the employee doing all the over time.
They’re referring to actual articles about how police across America are milking the clock at the cost of taxpayer dollars doing virtually nothing while clocked in and pocketing the extra money.
If they quit for another job it means that people are heavily underpaid for the amount of effort, stress, knowledge and experience they have. It's not that those who quit are worth less. It's those who are left that are undervaluing their hard work, but are too used to the frankly abnormal routine of hospital work (or have circumstances that make it difficult to leave).