Nurse's Pay - 2001

Nurses and Their Pay

Please tell me sanity will return to our world sometime soon. Nurses in British Columbia are currently demanding a 60% pay raise. What planet are they from? Every other union on earth has been crawling along at 0, 1, or 2% annual increments of increase.

We’ve all survived an extended period of slow economic activity. Sure enough, the first glimmer of perhaps better economic times, and the unions, or some of them at least, go insane.

I cannot fathom the logics of those demanding 60% pay increases. Are these practitioners going to engage in 60% more working activity? Will they be working 1.6 times as hard as they have been working?

They would have us believe that this increase is all to the common good. Nurses are, after all, essential to the success of our health care system.

No one will deny the value of our nurses. But if we pay all existing nurses 1.6 times as much, how will operating budgets, which are squeezed to the point of collapse on all sides by demands for more money, make this work.

Let’s see—we don’t have enough money to fund our health care system properly now. So we’ll add a 60% cost increase on the nurses pay portion of the budget and that will make our health care system more fiscally operational? I can’t quite get the math on this.

Do they want us to reduce the number of nurses, so that we can fit their pay demands within the operating budget? Or do they want for us to take funds from new equipment, or beds, or improvements, in order to make ends meet?

Or do they think government coffers are really bottomless wells from which to draw any amount of remuneration demanded? Methinks they forget where government money comes from.

I would have thought that the real need is in acquiring more nurses to make the loads lighter for those in toil. The demand for mega pay increases doesn’t appear to leave any room for expansion in the number of nurses sharing an increasing load.

Unless, of course, you believe that the government really is a bottomless well of gold coins and that any number of employees can successfully demand any amount of money they want. Magically, the gold will appear and all the existing nurses, and all the new nurses will all enjoy the new mega pay scales. And there will be money left for expansion, and new equipment, and more support staff. What a dream world someone is living in.

I suppose also that one public service union achieving such a gain wouldn’t impact any other demands within the system. All the other unions would just acknowledge the great deeds of the nursing profession and admit that nurses, only, deserve such gigantic increases. More lucid dreaming required.

I find it hard to perceive that the motives of this union rise any higher than a cash grab at an opportune time. The nursing shortage has been widely reported. Nurses are leaving for better pay in other places. Nurses are obviously overworked for these reasons. What better time to demand the big bucks. We’ll have no choice. We’ll have to pay them. Why is it that all this union power always boils down to something that looks like extortion made legal?

If our nurses really wanted to make their lives easier, I would think they might settle for more modest and reasonable increases along with a firm commitment from government to provide more nurses to ease the load.

But is it really an easier working day they’re after, or a bunch of fat and happy bank accounts? Makes you wonder.