Some nurses who have been in the profession for many years have observed deflationary forces and downward pressure on nursing wages during the past few years. The intended purpose of this article is to explore wage deflation in the nursing profession.
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While recently conducting a Google search on the topic of stagnating and deflating wages in the healthcare sector, I honestly did not unearth much scholarly information on the topic. However, many nurses and other healthcare workers in the U.S. have certainly been impacted by wages that have either flattened or outright decreased during the past few years.
Therefore, I believe that wage deflation in the nursing profession is a very real phenomenon that has been taking place for quite some time, even if a lack of formal data exists to help bolster my claims. Wage deflation is defined as an overall decrease in pay rates, whereas wage stagnation would be described as a general lack of growth in pay rates. Although some nurses and healthcare workers have been fortunate enough to have been shielded from downward pressure on their earnings, others have not been so lucky.
Several things have been happening that have placed downward pressure on nursing wages over the past four or five years. First of all, a surplus of nurses now exists in many job markets across the U.S., so many healthcare facilities now have the upper hand when negotiating wages. After all, if the nurse who has been unemployed for nine months does not accept the pay rate that HR is offering him or her, many others will take the job without hesitation even if the wage is not really competitive. The job candidate is not in a favorable position to negotiate for a higher pay rate if HR has several hundred applications submitted per job opening.
Second of all, schools of nursing have been graduating new nurses into local employment markets at a rate much faster than new job openings are being created. Many nursing schools have been created in recent years; in addition, some existing nursing programs have expanded to allow the admission of many more students.
The end result is that more new nurses are graduating than ever, while fewer nursing positions are becoming available due to people who are delaying retirement out of necessity or clinging to their jobs to support unemployed spouses.
Third, some middle-aged nurses with decades of experience have reported that their workplaces had terminated their employment to replace them with cheaper labor. In this economic climate, hospitals and other healthcare facilities are now able to hire nurses with less than five years of experience to replace employees with many years of experience who have topped out on the pay grid.
A hospital can save money by laying off 25 experienced nurses who had been earning more than $40 hourly and fill the job openings with 25 less-experienced nurses who will work for less than $30 hourly.
Some nurses who have been in the profession for many years have observed deflationary forces on wages during the past few years. Is this downward pressure on nursing pay rates going to become a 'new normal' to which we must become accustomed?
I do not know, nor do I pretend, to offer any solutions to what appears to be a complex issue.
