Hospital payroll squeeze: Will strikes pick up where pandemic resignations left off?
During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, around 1 in 5 nurses and other nonphysician healthcare workers quit their jobs. Many hospitals reacted the only way they could under the pressure: They paid premium wages to fill all those open positions.
Others contracted with traveling nurses who could practically name their prices.
Some hospitals did both.
On the national level, moves like those proved expensive. The hospital industry recorded an 8% spike in average hourly wages in the fourth quarter of 2021.
As Wall Street Journal columnist David Wainer points out, wages had been stabilizing for much of this year, albeit at a new and higher normal. But now with autumn comes a separate threat: hospital workers going on strike.
The main gripes in healthcare involve, first, pay rates lagging behind rises in the cost of living and, second, understaffing, which labor leaders stress contributes to exhaustion and burnout.
And wasn’t that point of job dissatisfaction the decisive sore spot for many job quitters during peak COVID?
Adding to the current motives are solidarity with strikers in other industries and inspiration from labor-sympathizing politicians promising worker-friendly policies.
One example of the latter, noted in the Wainer column, is a rule CMS is proposing for a national minimum nurse-staffing standard in the long-term-care-facility industry.
“The confluence of all these different pro-inflationary policies and labor actions in aggregate could ultimately catalyze a renewed upward trend in wage inflation,” says market analyst Scott Fidel as quoted by Wainer.
Stirring the pot most worryingly, the largest healthcare strike in history, at integrated health system Kaiser Permanente, ended Oct. 7 but may not really be over. For-profit giant Tenet is on the brink of a work stoppage at almost a dozen hospitals in California, as Wainer points out. And even major healthcare retailers like Walgreens and CVS are dealing with labor unrest.
More Wainer:
“While wage inflation is a challenge for all businesses, for hospitals it is a bigger deal because salaries constitute about 50% of their expense base. … Furthermore, hospitals can’t immediately pass on sharp rises in wages to insurers because most contracts with payers are multiyear. … [W]ith healthcare workers in short supply for the foreseeable future and politicians and the public increasingly siding with unions, wage inflation will continue to threaten [hospitals’] finances.”
Other hospital perspectives of note from around the web this week:
- ‘Hospitals have gladly accepted the tax benefits that come with nonprofit status but have failed to provide the required community benefits.’—U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (source: written committee report)
- ‘You almost don’t want to know, but you’re getting [cyber]attacked on almost a daily basis. It’s just a brutal effort every day.’—Lifespan Health System CEO John Fernandez (source: WPRI-TV in Providence, R.I.)
- ‘There is just this increase in aggressiveness from patients. They are not as predictable as they used to be.’—Clinical social worker Toni Sladek of UCHealth Poudre Valley Hospital in Colorado (source: The Colorado Sun)
- ‘Imagine a situation that in one of the [hospital] units, someone just wounded by a terrorist is right next to the terrorist who wounded him.’—Professor Shimon Glick of Ben-Gurion University’s Faculty of Health Science (source: The Jerusalem Post)
- ‘The body bags started and just kept coming and coming and now [the hospital] is a graveyard. I have to stop myself from thinking about how much worse it will get.’—Nurse Abu Elias Shobaki of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City (source: AP)
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.