Feature
Sick pay
by Mark Revington
Will this be the year of pay equity for nurses?
Tracey Williams put herself through university by working in a bank call centre. Three years after graduating with a Bachelor of Nursing, she is on the same hourly rate that she earned working at the call centre. And that is after a quick rise up the nursing pay scale due to her ability.
Trish Burke trained as a midwife while she had three children under six and a partner in a low-paid job. Her study included being on call during some semesters and fulltime shiftwork as an unpaid student midwife. She borrowed $10,000 a year on her student loan while training and now has a $30,000 debt that she doubts she’ll ever be able to pay back. She works most weekends, feels permanently tired and, last Christmas, slept for most of Christmas Day because she had worked the previous night. Her basic salary is $41,000. That might nudge up to $43,000 with penal rates.
Both women love nursing, despite the pay and conditions. But Burke feels as if she’s caught in a poverty trap that doesn’t recognise her training, skill and experience. Williams is fitting in study in information systems and ecommerce around her shift work in an emergency ward and plans to leave nursing next year. The salary isn’t good enough, she says, to pay off her student loan and enable her to buy a house.
Last July, a nationwide poll showed that most New Zealanders thought nurses were underpaid and should get around the same pay as teachers and police. This year, it may finally happen.
A Pay Equity Taskforce, set up by the government to report on how to close the gender pay gap in the public service, public health sector and education sector, will report back early this month with a five-year plan.
Will it meet the expectations of nurses, who want the government to settle their claim for pay parity in the same way it did for teachers in 2002?
Laila Harre, organising services manager for the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, and a member of the taskforce, says she hopes its report will include a recommendation for quick action on nurses’ claims for pay equity.
“A five-year plan of action doesn’t mean it has to take five years for anything to happen, and we’ve been very clear on the taskforce, as Council of Trade Union representatives, that for the plan of action to have credibility, we’d had to have the earliest outcomes that could be achieved within it.”
And if not? “Our strong preference is for that to come through a rational negotiation process directly with government, but if sufficient progress can’t be made before our agreements expire in June then it will need to be pursued through collective bargaining. With the industrial tools available to the union in that case.”
In other words, strike action by nurses throughout the country and the resultant chaos. It’s not something nurses want to contemplate, but they believe this is their year.
Williams always wanted to be a police officer or a nurse. Either job would offer contact with people and a working day less mundane than a nine-to-five office job. She decided on nursing because that would give her a degree. She didn’t stop to think about how much money she would earn. If she had plumped for policing, she would have been put through six months at police training college on full pay, and started on a base salary of $46,000. Sure, she would then have to deal with aggression, possibly on a daily basis out on the streets. But, as a nurse in a busy emergency department, she says she deals with aggressive people on almost every shift. And she deals with life and death on every shift.
“On top of that, we do everyone else’s job. The cleaners, for example, aren’t allowed to touch blood products, so we do the cleaning. We deal with a lot of emotion and a lot of aggressive patients who are often dropped off by the police.”
She has a $17,000 student loan on which she just manages to pay interest. Most friends she went through university with had similar loans. Most have paid them off, she says.
Burke isn’t planning to go anywhere. If she gets any time off, she will sleep. She loves being a midwife, but points out that it’s not the continual joyful experience of delivering new babies that people sometimes assume. Birth can be a stressful, emotional, rollercoaster ride. “You give your all, all the time. We have a high attrition rate in midwifery because of the strain. My class is exceptional. We started with 22 and 20 graduated. Most classes drop down to nine or so.”
She talks of the frustration of not being able to do a better job because of short-staffed shifts. “I always call it damage control because it’s so task-orientated.”
Her $30,000 student debt is like an albatross around her neck.
“I hate it. It really does weigh people down.” But this year? Nurses really feel like this could be the year, she says. “The apathy has gone. People are saying this time it’s going to happen.”
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