Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly Pay Rate
from the the-ebayification-of-everything dept
When I was in business school we had a convoluted computerized bidding process (on a Vax) to get into various classes. Now, with the success of eBay, it seems that everything is becoming auctionable. A hospital in upstate NY is using an online bidding process to fill open schedule spots for nurses. The nurses get to log in, see what timeslots are open, and bid how much they'd want to work those hours. If they match the necessary qualifications the lowest bidder wins. The nurses find that they can make more money than their standard wages (or augment their standard wages) by picking less desirable times to work (which sometimes are more convenient for them). The hospitals save money by not having to hire outside nurses (at much higher rates) to fill open timeslots.
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Seventh Heaven
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Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly Pay
Interesting idea... but what happens when the hospital opens bidding to every nurse, including the outside nurses.
Great for "the Economy", since employers would get cheap labor, not so good for the actual people who do the work. Desparation is good for employers.
For some reason I've been getting the impulse to reread "Neuromancer"...
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No Subject Given
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
Though this system has been used before, as Airline Pilots and Flight Attendants currently use a similar bidding process to obtain their flight routes.
According to the article (it seems like less and less of those commenting are actually reading the articles lately,) there are two important things to point out: first is that the system is mainly used by part-time nurses, who get the opportunity to work instead of the hospital hiring far more expensive temp agency nurses, and that the system is only used by salary nurses to book overtime work. And second, according to the article, the nurses actually get paid more than the national average (which according to the article is $30/hour), though less than the cost of hiring a nurse from a temp agency (which the article states is something like $47/hour,) since the nurse there is probably getting paid less, and the overhead, or profit to the agency gets the difference.
It seems that those who wish to take the shifts no one else wants can ask for more money than what they would get taking the shifts that everyone wants. I don't see how this is anything worse than a boss giving you a bonus/raise for working on something that nobody else wants to do.
Maybe someone might do this in the future, but they may not get the intended results, since getting someone trained up to your standards is quite difficult when you keep changing them.
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Re: Seventh Heaven
Hmmm...according to the article, the national base pay average for a nurse is $62,400. And like every other job, the more education you have, the more doors that are opened to you as far as work goes, and the more likelihood that you will get higher pay and better positions. The bare minimum requirement for being a Registered Nurse, according to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos083.htm, is to have an Associate Degree in Nursing from an approved nursing program, though many are given at community colleges, over a third of the programs give Bachelor's degrees in Nursing, and are given at Universities.
But as for the 10 women to every man, I had about the same situation taking some of the required Biology classes in order to get my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, where the classes required where entry level Nursing school classes which all the nurses had to take. I personally enjoyed being in a room with 500 people, and 4 in 5 of them were women, yeah, it was fun.
I wish they would allow me to go back to take Biology over again, just to audit the course...
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
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Re: Seventh Heaven
That's counting places like rural Alabama where wages are low -- just as they are for software engineers there. In a big city, the average nurse can expect $80k. A well-qualified nurse with various certificates can easily make six figures.
The bare minimum requirement for being a Registered Nurse, according to http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos083.htm, is to have an Associate Degree in Nursing from an approved nursing program, though many are given at community colleges, over a third of the programs give Bachelor's degrees in Nursing, and are given at Universities.
The wage/status difference between an ASN (associate degree in nursing) and BSN (bachelor's degree) is pretty subtle. Education only makes a significant difference once you get a masters (NP) or PhD (ND) in nursing. Then again, that's if you want the heavy responsibilities of overseeing a ward, etc. There is also anti-male bias for nursing management positions.
OTOH, nursing (and even medical schools) judge applicants more by personality than intelligence. The "requirements" for admission may talk about GPA's or other scores, but the reality is that more weight is placed on personality -- the ideal health worker should want to save the starving HIV+ babies of Africa and not question the system too much. Depending on how intellectually oriented you are, health care careers may not be the right choice for you. For intellectuals, there are medical research careers that pay well and offer job security.
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
It's not that simple, for a variety of reasons.
1. Unlike IT, health care jobs require formal licenses and certificates, which are typically issued on a state-by-state basis. Thus, a health care worker from a low-wage country will have to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of obtaining a local license.
2. Unlike IT, nurses are highly unionized, and regularly shut down hospitals. Due to the nature of the work, hospitals have little leverage when faced with dying patients.
3. Unlike IT, health care workers must speak English well, and have presentable social skills -- they cannot stink or talk loudly in foreign languages.
4. Unlike IT, there is two-way traffic: a health care worker from a high-wage country has job opportunities in poor countries via peace corps, etc.
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
> 1. [...] a health care worker from a low-wage country will have to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of obtaining a local license.
...and if you can't get into school here, you can always spend daddy's money in Granada; of course some countries realize this (daddy doesn't want to support you forever and that's why he sends your dumb ass to school) and crank out health care workers with the intent of re-cooping their human investment in taxes.
> 2. Unlike IT, nurses are highly unionized, [...]
Most professions that are in high natural market demand are un-unionized. Protection is what a union for... either protection from unsafe working conditions or protection from natural market conditions. Most workers recognize unions for what they are and choose to work ouside of the framework of a union if their job is in demand/highly compensaited. Of course, there's always those poor slobs who's job is neither in demand or particularly dangerous and thus non-unionized... for them, there's the minimum wage. That is what congress is for... kinda like an employers union; protection from the workers.
Personally, I think it would be quite funny to see IT get unionized... nothing like having to fork over 10% of your salery after taking a permanent 30% reduction in pay AND spend anywhere from 10% to 15% of the time striking... unpaid.
Hell, that might even *stop* outsourcing to India.
> 3. Unlike IT, health care workers must speak English well, and have presentable social skills
Once coders move past the "code-monkey" part of life, even the best coder on the planet will realize that being able to communicate effectively and operate in a wide variety of social situations works to their advantage.
After all, if it weren't for the sweet-smelling and sociopathicly social poeple in sales turning code-monkey's product into $$s, we'de all be sitting around in our underware, un-showered for three days straight coding GPL.
> 4. Unlike IT, there is two-way traffic: a health care worker from a high-wage country has job opportunities in poor countries via peace corps, etc.
Oh, you can go work in India too, if you want... There are lots of world wide NGOs (and I'm not talking about Halliburton Bagdad network architech contracts @$400k/year... a muslum aribic speaking person with a CCIE, active security clearance and small arms proficiency prefered... are there any of those left?) who are seeking IT talent, but it usually helps to be at least bi-lingual (the old joke about "what do you call somone who speaks only one language?" aside).
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
I was extrapolating to a possible Brave New World! Let's talk outside nurses and smelly IT people.
Read Neuromancer anyway. Great book, scary.
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Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hourly
This is a worry, but I believe that this is a totally unworkable situation, which will die before it really gets started. I personally think the idea of getting desperate folks into jobs may be really productive, since they are likely to have an entirely different ethic (out of necessity) than folks who have become complacent with doing a half-asked job (and believe me, there are enough of those in the IT field to salt the earth with.)
However, when it comes down to this, employers are going to need workers, and workers aren't going to want to work in such a system, especially one where they are kept in the poor-house while working for a rich bosses who abuses them. We've seen how feudal systems work and unless you are working for a good king or lord, you'll most likely be far less productive than someone who is working for the money to support themselves. Motivation just isn't there. Sure people will be desperate, and will try to get into a job to pay their bills, but they won't last very long before the next one comes along to usurp their position with promises of lower pay. The cost of retraining alone will overwhelm any profit the company may get from potential employees bidding their way into a job, only to be outbid in 3 months by someone else.
The biggest fear I have right now isn't the contracting issues, it is the utter lack of ethics of leaders and management, who feel that an ever increasing bottom-line is required in order to keep the shareholders happy, and will lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep their numbers going up, regardless of their employees or even their own freedom (financial fraud usually results in jail time.)
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OT: Re: Nurses Bidding On Their Work Schedule, Hou
Actually, I liked both books. Brave New World (which you can read online at http://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html was definately my favorite of the two though, probably because of the Soma and the fact that Aldous Huxley was writing about this stuff (in 1932) before most of it existed. Neuromancer (which you may still find in the stores like Amazon.com/Borders, otherwise check your local library,) on the other hand, was written by William Gibson in 1984, was far more contemporary and while it was still a great book, it was far more "with-the-times" then Huxley's Brave New World. Still, both authors are futurists, and each author did a great job of showing the moral plays of living in such a future world.
Then again, William Gibson's Neuromancer was pretty much required reading for those of us who played Shadowrun in high-school. I haven't read it in quite a few years (since 1986,) and I think it is about time to go back and read it again.
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Nursing Issues, Re: Seventh Heaven
I personally am tired of people who say that Nurses make six figures. Maybe with 15-30 years of experience in the same hospital and a masters to boot, a staff nurse can work his/her way up to the $100k line.Even Nurse managers dont make anywhere near that. The other options are to do 60 hour work weeks or work for an agency in a specialty area.
Either way, we are not talking base pay. And we are not talking national average either. Just 30 miles from NYC the average salary drops 10k.
That's 50-$55k, 10k ABOVE the national average.
And about the dying babies in africa, (i know many a nursing student who is more concerned with starting salary), you dont have to be a bleeding heart, just a conscientious practitioner with a modicum of respect for people.
You can be quite successful as an advaced practice nurse with your INTELLECT being in full use. Nursing research, Informatics and legal consulting can burn your intellectual fuel much better than lab rat sampling,and documentation ever will, trust me.
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