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Comment by engeljohnb | Hacker News Reader

I'm a male healthcare worker (cardiac sonographer), and even though there are a lot more women, there were never any barriers for me because of my gender.

If there's a shortage, it's because employers need to pay more, same as every other labor "shortage." Nursing is in demand everywhere, and not everyone has what it takes to do their work. If they could be making more money somewhere else, that's where they'll go.

A couple of years ago, I compared my salary to all my friends in the same field, and found they were all making at least 25% more than me. I asked my work for more money, they said no, so I left. Last I heard they can't find anyone who'll work for so little except fresh grads who can't keep up with the heavy workload nor the high quality demanded by the doctors. And several nurses have told me similar stories.

Just pay.

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You know what? I'm glad that nurses and healthcare workers are finally not thinking of the patients first and are thinking of their pocketbooks too.

No, really, I mean it.

For decades, the healthcare complex has been exploiting these workers to our detriment.

The supply of workers is really high, typically, as there is this nobility to the professions. You are a 'helper', you are 'doing something with your life', you have a 'calling'. That extra feel-feels accounted for a lot of extra people in the workforce and that depressed wages as it increased supply. The actual work itself suffered too, as we all had to deal with burnt out healthcare workers with too many bills and not enough dollars. Even a pandemic barely hurt he business model (as far as I can tell from a quick googling).

But if workers start caring about the money more, then the wages will rise (hopefully), and that will attract better workers and not ones near the near of their ropes financially. We all will be better off. I think this goes for teachers too.

Came here to say this. So many of my friends are male nurses. The thing that keeps them from sticking around is the pay. There's only so much crap you can take (literal and metaphorical) for a terrible salary. My housemate worked at UNC here in North Carolina. Not only was his pay terrible, he had to pay for on-campus parking. And if there was a sports game, he wasn't allowed to use the parking lot (having to park substantially further away and take a shuttle).

The people running the system are so completely disconnected from the experience of being a nurse that they're destroying the industry from the top down.

I think it's also a perception thing. In the last 10-20 years or so it's changed quite a bit, when I was younger you had "nurses" and "male nurses". Nurses were automatically female, so any who weren't were explicitly tagged as such because it was such an exceptional thing.

It's sort of like IT and engineering, that was exclusively male at one point. Not because women were excluded but because computers were things for geeks and dorks and completely uncool to be associated with.

(Technically that's not 100% true, we did have one female student on display in a glass case at the entrance to the School of Engineering).

It's kind of wild that our system seems to be specifically set up to exploit people who care.

Sociopath who views people as just a barrier to their goals? Promotion to CEO, billion dollar bonus. Millions of tax dollars spent to bail you out of trouble.

Empathetic person willing to literally put your body on the line for other? Shit pay, shit hours, one unlucky break away from destitution.

What's even crazier is the majority of Americans seem to like it this way.

> It's kind of wild that our system seems to be specifically set up to exploit people who care.

Not at all. Caring has traditionally been woman pursuits. And you can underpay cause they care.

There's a ton of academic studies under the terms of "emotional labor". Retail is emotional labor. Nursing. Education, childcare, health care, social work, hospitality, media, advocacy, aviation.

And those jobs pay trash precisely because people (read: women) care. So they're exploitable.

The jobs that you exploit others and forced not to care pay the most.

Not sure why you said 'Not at all'. Your comment seems to corroborate exactly what I said. People who don't care are specifically rewarded more than people who do and it's by design.

Its not at all wild.

The capitalists set the system up. Capitalism exploits by its nature. So finding people who are more easily exploitable makes a great deal of capitalist sense. That's how and why this shit was set up.

Ah, ok I see. Your correcting the fact that I think it's wild when it actually shouldn't be surprising. I understand now.

I don’t understand how healthcare can get even more expensive without the system just utterly collapsing. That being said, we could definitely justify higher salaries with greater productivity (via automation), but the market tends to reward the capitalists for that instead of the workers. We really have to figure that out soon.

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