Hospitals Are Using the Nursing Shortage to Stiff Health Care Workers
Rather than materially address the underlying issues of the nursing shortage crisis, health care providers are exploiting it in order to further consolidate power at the top of industry hierarchies — and break the power of organized labor below.
A nurse wipes her face shield after attending a COVID-19 patient in an intensive care unit in California. (APU GOMES/AFP via Getty Images)
There’s no shortage of articles about our nationwide nursing shortage. Everywhere, foreboding headlines paint a dire picture of a health care system stressed by a skyrocketing number of patients and a dwindling number of nurses able to care for them.
But there are no attendant articles about hospital corporations, public health systems, and politicians rising to meet this shortage. One would expect hospitals to be aggressively recruiting and retaining as many nurses as possible with competitive pay, safe working conditions, and attractive benefits. But industry-wide labor disputes throughout the pandemic indicate that the opposite is true.
Industry bosses’ refusal to address this labor shortage by granting nurses even the most basic rights and protections — despite our nation’s major health systems making billions in surplus over the course of the pandemic — suggests that this crisis in nursing isn’t a crisis for everybody.
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