"Orlando Health announced Monday, August 5 that they will be cutting the night and weekend shift differential to thousands of employees, across 8 area hospitals, to go in effect September 8. These cuts are more than 50% of the current rate and will result to each an individual loss upwards of $600/month, $7000-$15,000/year. A majority of the employees affected are Nurses, who are already notoriously underpaid and overworked. Corporate members are denying any request for negotiations, and gave less than 1-month notice for employees to acclimate to this substantial financial blow. The Orlando health corporation decided they want to decrease pay significantly, with no decrease in employee workload."
I signed the petition but I don't think it will do much good. The only things corporations seem to respond to are things that directly effect the bottom line. That usually means either bad PR (local news usually eats this stuff up, so calling tv and radio stations may help), or lack of enough employees (which usually equates to bad customer service and therefor lost customers and revenue).
You can't replace every night shift and weekend worker over night....... Two weeks is all that is needed and I bet the president would be on the phone with the CEO....
If you are short staffed, don't make excuses- make sure that you tell the patient that management won't allow more nurses or aide, so their mother will just have to wait for that bedpan, or stay hungry until you can free someone to feed her. Make the patients and visitors feel the cuts!! Nothing will ever change until the public realizes how their care will suffer from deliberate staffing shortages!
I find the bolded part of your post particularly disgusting. Nurses are now supposed to go from patient advocates to patient punishers, and drag innocent sick people into their wage battles? Regardless of management's actions and how the nurses feel about it, these people are sick and need help and none of it is THEIR fault, so they should be left out of it as much as possible. Will their care suffer? Probably. But that doesn't mean that nurses should be in their rooms gleefully drawing battle lines with their managers across the bodies of people in need.
Bottom line, if you don't like the working conditions at your job, find a different one. Is it hard? Does the economy suck right now? You betcha. But there are other jobs and if you look hard enough you can find them. Might not be your dream job. Might not be in the location you want. But there's something. Or you can stay and fight the wage battle, but leave the sick, needy people whose fault it isn't out of it.
How sad, when will people wake-up and understand that nurses ARE health care!! Nurses are already underpaid, overworked, and they want to take more from them?? Nurses GIVE so much yet they have to take pay cuts and are often disrespected, honestly I could not tell you who manages the hospital I have been to or who the CEO is, but I can name the nurses who cared for me years later, that speaks volumes about who has a more important role, and REALLY runs the hospital. Your profession helps keep people alive and live better that is priceless.
I'm very protective over your profession and always will be, because members of your profession have always been good to me and gave me great care. You all deserve better.
Specializes in Med-surge, hospice, LTC, tele, rehab.
A hospital I used to work at recently cut nurse's and CNA's evening/night and weekend differential pay by almost half too. They cut down on staffing too so nurses were essentially doing more work with less pay. Morale was very low and tons of people quit. They have lost a lot of good and long-time employees because of it but they don't care. They just pay temp/agency nurses to work. Doesn't make sense because it probably costs them more to pay temps and it cuts down on continuity of care in the long run. Thank goodness I got out of there.
This will be dismissed by those insisting that the management must just be evil, greedy bastards. I can't imagine they would lie about something so easily verified, though I am sure this letter was molded by their PR people like modeling clay. All businesses do that if they are wise.
The fact is, it's a brave new world in health care, and we will all be impacted by the massive changes being imposed upon us. I'm in the inpatient float pool for a hospice company, and I've been getting cancelled from nearly half my shifts lately. The massive cuts in Medicare and changes in how patients qualify for services are causing chronic low census in our units. Two of them are completely closed right now, out of 18. While it sucks and is starting to hurt financially, if the company closes down because it doesn't cut labor costs where it can, I won't have any job at all. That would hurt a lot more.
And has ANYONE THOUGHT TO CALL THE NNOC AND UNIONIZE??!! THAT is the ONLY THING THAT WILL STOP NURSES FROM BEING VICTIMIZED LIKE THEY ARE!
Quit being the Martyr Marys that nurse always are, take the bull by the horn and go to it. Nurses have been slow to unionize, and that is why we are always being taken advantage of. There is NO reason for it.
ALL of the hospital administors, and management, have contracts!! Why don't the worker bees, who really need it, get taken for a ride.
Start having rallies in very public places, invite the news stations, CNN, local papers, etc. Provide free BP checks, Health screenings for kids, and older people, Diabetic teaching, have ballloons for the kids, fliers, some free, inexpensive give aways, like packs of kleenex, etc. The name if the game is to get the public on your side.
Make really big posters, and print the salaries, bennies, etc, of the hospital CEO, administrators, management, and make sure that you make note that not one of these big wigs is taking a pay cut, and it is REALLY THEIR HEALTH CARE THAT IS GOING TO TAKE A BEATING!!
If you are short staffed, don't make excuses- make sure that you tell the patient that management won't allow more nurses or aide, so their mother will just have to wait for that bedpan, or stay hungry until you can free someone to feed her. Make the patients and visitors feel the cuts!! Nothing will ever change until the public realizes how their care will suffer from deliberate staffing shortages!
JMHO and my NY $0.02
Lindarn, RN, BSN, CCRN (ret)
Somewhere in the PACNW
Lindarn, I've missed your posts and wondered what happened to you. If our government monitored health care mergers as closely as they're looking at this American-US Air merger, working conditions might improve since workers would have more choice. I think these Orlando nurses are in a really tough position in a 2-shop town. Bad working conditions are a result of an over-supply of labor. Mandating BSN would decrease our numbers and increase our value to the employer (even if BSN did nothing else, but I don't believe that). We will never get the respect due to us as long as ADN programs crank them out every 2 years adding to the over-supply of labor.
yours is a variation on the martyr mary syndrome, the patient waiting to be fed is not nurses' fault, but a result of understaffing. Big difference.
I find the bolded part of your post particularly disgusting. Nurses are now supposed to go from patient advocates to patient punishers, and drag innocent sick people into their wage battles? Regardless of management's actions and how the nurses feel about it, these people are sick and need help and none of it is THEIR fault, so they should be left out of it as much as possible. Will their care suffer? Probably. But that doesn't mean that nurses should be in their rooms gleefully drawing battle lines with their managers across the bodies of people in need.
Bottom line, if you don't like the working conditions at your job, find a different one. Is it hard? Does the economy suck right now? You betcha. But there are other jobs and if you look hard enough you can find them. Might not be your dream job. Might not be in the location you want. But there's something. Or you can stay and fight the wage battle, but leave the sick, needy people whose fault it isn't out of it.
Perhaps, but above market rates in Fl mean very little. This from a facility that was offering 19 - 22) dollars an hr (albeit w agency housing) to travelers back a few years. Given that a facility in Ocala was offering $16-19/hr and wanting nurses to have certification in their speciality, that probably was above market value .
To those that think that the nurses can just up and change jobs, think again. There are very few year round full time jobs with reasonable hours. In FL, you will be worked like dog during the busy season, and low censused/floated all throughout the offseason. Nurses are treated as a disposable commodity or interchangeable part during the offseason. And most nurses cannot just pull up stakes and move across country.
Just call in and boycott. If you work for a large system, you will be fired and blackballed. Standing on principle is great ..... If you are wealthy, have a working spouse, don't need to eat or pay bills. The rest of us that don't fall into that category, well too bad.
And Linda, the union at the FL hospitals that I worked for were USELESS!!!!! They didn't dare strike as no one can afford to be fired. they let the facility break rules set down repeatedly. FL is an at will state. In most other facilities, if the word "union" is said, the PTB will find a way to retaliate.
You can thank the glut of nurses that have been and are being pumped out of the endless numbers of nursing schools for this.
Exactly!!!
Now Orlando Health can cut benefits for experienced nurses because there are 10 new grads they could tie in to a contract at a cheaper rate.
Sad part about Orlando is that it's either Orlando Health or Florida Hospital - so I'm waiting to hear about FH making wage changes as well and paying their nurses less.
At FH, they are striving for magnet status, so they have 2 tech/CNA during the day, but only one tech/CNA during night shift but they are keeping nurse to patient ratios at 1:8 overnights! They're already overworking nurses at FH. It's only a matter of time before the Orlando job market crumbles.
RLtinker, LPN
282 Posts
I signed the petition but I don't think it will do much good. The only things corporations seem to respond to are things that directly effect the bottom line. That usually means either bad PR (local news usually eats this stuff up, so calling tv and radio stations may help), or lack of enough employees (which usually equates to bad customer service and therefor lost customers and revenue).