Eventually we all benefit from them, but at any given point they are out of sight and out of mind. That causes people to not really care.
1) Their unions are actually some form of inneficient brokers who fails to truly represent them politically and change the system in their favor. Instead, they simply take a cut on their paycheck, and treats them like factory workers while they should be treated as knowledge workers. Even if nurses and teachers are super important, we treat them like cogs in a machine and fail to frame their role as an investment in society. They are ''cost centers''.
2) The north american medical system (US and Canada) might differ in their funding, but are very similar in their organization compared to European models. Its all about the physician-patient relation, the former being all powerful and the later being a moron. In Canada, they are actually not employed by the state, but are in fact their own small businesses. Oh and they have de facto state monopoly on crucial medical tasks, making every other actor their economic bottom bitch.
3) A huge number of people who choose the job are very empathic-saviour types, and actually are professional martyrs who must endure poor working conditions to save others otherwise they would be bad.
Not to necessarily knock nurse pay, it is a common route to a middle and even upper-middle class life.
If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people.
I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.
I'm curious, what do you think the compensation for being a nurse should look like?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work
Care workers hold crucial jobs but are often paid much less than other professions putting forth similar effort and similar amounts of training. Often, they're told that they do it for the love of their charges (whether it's nursing, teaching, social services), and most especially the completely unpaid child care at home.
And yeah, most care work professions are associated with being "women's work".
If you want the workplace to improve, hold management responsible for their decisions.
Without that, we fall back on more qualitative, holistic methods they are both game-able and subjective.
We may see a general cultural shift towards higher teacher pay (which I believe would be positive if paired with higher professional standards), but it’s difficult to argue in our current culture that teachers “deserve” more pay when we can’t even reliably determine which teachers are having an above average educational impact.
There is one: a free market. Private schools don't have the luxury of doing studies forever; if their teaching is not effective, they go out of business. The ones who stay in business have a direct, quantitative measure of the effectiveness of their teachers: profit.
Parents don't have to "believe" teachers are effective; they can see the results for themselves and judge them. My parents had no problem telling which of my teachers were actually teaching me things and which were just boring me to death in class.
As for "rigorous", the whole point of the comment I responded to was that there are no "rigorous" third-party measures of teacher effectiveness. That's the "problem" that all these experts have been struggling unsuccessfully to solve for decades. The reason they can't solve it is that as they have conceived the "problem", it's not solvable. The people in a position to judge the effectiveness of teachers are the people who directly observe the impact of their teaching. Third-party "experts" can't do that.
Not all parents are that involved, and a kid being bored in class isn't necessarily the teacher's fault.
Then that's the root problem that needs to be fixed, and trying to invent ways for third party "experts" to "measure teacher effectiveness" won't help.
> a kid being bored in class isn't necessarily the teacher's fault
It might not be that individual teacher's fault, true; the kid might just be in the wrong class. But it still means there's a teaching problem.
Edit: The only nurse that seemed unhappy was an older agency nurse who was recently laid off from a hospital, and was having trouble finding steady work because she didn't have a four year degree. I wonder if the stress from changing standards is a factor.
Note too that covid workers were highly compensated for their work, at least where I live. Our annual income doubled last year because of her work in the covid units. The issue isn't a financial one, but from dealing first-hand with so much death, suffering, and stress on a daily basis.
Without all three of those sectors modern societies would collapse.
The Ontario Teacher's Union might be the most powerful organization in Ontario. They own major league sports teams.
Nurses salary in Bay Area is $133K, national average is $80K which is pretty good. [1]
[1] https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-...
Edit: they own major league sports teams? That’s wild.
Education has by far one of the lowest suicide rates - of course, that's only one crude indirect measure of things. Jobs in education tend to be very stable, they are very highly regarded in the social sense (far more so than businessmen, politicians etc.) [2] In some places wages are not so good, but that's not always the case. Nurses are reasonably well comped but it's also impossible to quantify for some stress factors.
Doctor's suicide rates are effectively the highest of any profession (note that for Healthcare as an 'industry' the numbers are lower, but for Doctor specifically, it's high, i.e. most of the industry are not dealing directly with trauma, death).
Overall - I think COVID is obvious a giant bank of stress and generational PTSD and it's surprising how well the workers are taking it.
Doctors and Nurses are some of the most professional and conscientious people out there, the least likely to complain i.e. and occupational sense of duty that transcends 'compensation'.
COVID is a kind of war for them, it's just grinding them down.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm