friend of mine is a registered nurse at a public/county hospital and they told me that they recently went on a strike. aside from the most obvious reasons for striking (improved working conditions and pay equity) what struck me the most is that for every minute these negotiations go on, $14K of our taxpayer money goes down the drain. that's right, let me repeat that... For every 1 minute the government refuses to negotiate, $14K of our taxpayer $ disappears. As of now, they've already spent $40M for just a few days worth and sounds like they're prepared to spend +$100M. WTF, does this not bother anyone? We complain of high cost of living in the bay area, inflation and high income & property taxes..(seriously i see maybe 55% of my gross pay), but the sheer scale of gross negligence and incompetence displayed by yet another government agency is just...beyond words. do we just STFU and continue coding or ...what can we do? #healthcare #health
Blame the government for not fixing the terrible conditions which allow healthcare workers to be abused while being severely underpaid, all while healthcare companies make record profits.
You get paid 100s of thousands of dollars so don't think striking is worth your while. If you are being paid 100k you would join a strike too. Tax payers will pay the cost anyway - either in increased wages so they don't need to strike, or in lost time. The fact that you can't do without them shows that they are underpaid.
But the hospital could likely hire workers who would happy take the job, so it's not like they "couldn't do without them" specifically. Strikes are different. they are meant to flex power to prevent the job market from functioning as it normally does by paralyzing the institution before it has the chance to hire replacements.
Strikes will stop when wages are fair value. Even if software engineering was unionized, you won't find 400-700k TC faang engineers participating in them.
Salaries for healthcare workers have already surged double digits each year for multiple years since COVID. I don't know the specifics on this strike but it's fair for institutions and especially customers of healthcare to play hardball these days when costs are sky high. We already spend more as a percent of GDP (i.e., after normalizing for wealth) on healthcare than any other country, twice as much as many rich and old countries. Our government alone spends more on healthcare than the biggest six countries with universal healthcare combined and yet hospitals will still bankrupt families anyway. So either way, healthcare will always be a money black hole so long as there's zero price competition.
I'll be the last person to defend any government. That said we need more context on this strike. Just because their profession is noble, it doesn't mean they are always right. Anyway I don't care. Burn my tax dollars all you want. It will either get burned here or in Ukraine or Israel.
my tax dollars fund a foreign military dropping bombs on women and children ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude, just wait till you find out what it costs to fire a single missile.
I want to know what these sportsball flyovers with several A10s cost. I know a hellfire is 100k a pop
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Don’t know, don’t care. I don’t get to vote, so I don’t give a fuck. I pay for private health care and am tired of being a 2nd class H1B worker.