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Would You Bid for a Job?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Several U.S. hospitals have found an innovative way to deal with nursing shortage. They post shift openings and the highest hourly rate they're willing to pay on their internal networks. Then, the nurses bid online for these extra shifts. The lowest bidders get the shifts and are notified by e-mail. This bidding process is almost certainly a good thing for the hospitals, but is it good for the nurses? Or safe for you? And what will happen if other industries also adopt auction systems? Imagine a company telling you, "Hey, you want to make some extra dollars by building this car or writing this piece of software? Name your price, and you'll make some more cash." What do you think of this bidding process? Read more before posting your comments."
Another example of what happens when the primary corporate philosophy is predatory and parasite friendly.
it is a result of black and white accounting values, instead of seeing a full spectrum color photo of the situation, which means acknowledging more than personal selfish goals as important.
Survival is a multidimensional activity. Otherwise you sacrifice everyone else's quality of life for your selfish ends. Do that too often and you end up living inside a toliet bowl with the only rope out tied off to the toilet handle.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
An EMT described essentially that, but I think he put it more eloquently:
"This is how they set up a triage. They make four areas. A green area, a yellow area, a red area, and a black area. In the green area goes people who are in need of treatment, but will basically survive if they aren't immediately tended to. In the yellow area they put people who are in need of treatment or they'll die. They put corpses in the black area."
Here's where we ask "So who goes in the red area?", obviously being set up.
"In the red area they put people who are badly injured but still alive. But they don't receive any treatment, because either they're untreatable, or the effort that they put into treating them could save several times as many people in the yellow area. People they put into the red area are abandoned to die."
You could also argue that you would be helped by the nurse who cares least about money, and cares most about helping people.
My wife is an RN, and let me say this is a great idea. In one of her previous jobs, they were perpetually short-staffed. Many Saturdays, the manager would call, sometimes twice, begging each RN to come work.
I would tell my wife "name your price". Seriously. The manager doesn't want to waste literally hours trying to get someone to come in. Tell her you'll work for an extra $10/hour, and she would likely jump on it.
In the hospital, it's worse. If they can't get staff, they have to go to an "agency" and pay $50-$60/hour, about twice what a staff nurse costs. It just makes sense to meet your own staff half way- pay them $40/hour and both end off better.
It's economics 101. If you have trouble getting enough staff members to work for you, then by definition you aren't paying enough. Period. The stark reality for a hospital is that they can either raise pay a little and actually get the staff that they need, or they can pay out the ass for agency nurses. The solution is obvious.
An auction system makes good sense.
Do you have ESP?
Here's a view from the other side of the world.
In Australia and many European countries holding this kind of reverse auction for pay rates is illegal. The reason is quite simple - in occupations like nursing where there's an oversupply of willing workers the employers are able to use a reverse auction to bid wages right down to the breadline. Employees will be desperate enough to bid themselves into poverty just to get their next meal. This makes employers happy but results in a lot of employees suffering greatly.
The alternative is a "minimum wage" system which we've traditionally used here in Australia. This more egalitarian approach reduces the incidence of poverty in the country but also reduces the chance for employers to get incredibly rich.
We used to have an oversupply of doctors and nurses here and (cutting a long story short) we now have shortages of doctors and nurses due to many leaving the profession. This in turn is starting to drive their wages back up again. Most importantly due to our minimum wage policies, unemployment benefits and the unions they didn't all starve during this adjustment.
Having said all that stuff about minimum wage, Australia is gradually trending towards an individual employment contract model more like the US - and as a result the social divide here is increasing. Thirty years ago true poverty and homelessness were rather rare here - a very different situation to the US. Trailer parks were almost unknown here compared to the US. Homelessness was also comparatively rare back then. The visible rate of homelessness here is now maybe ten times what it was back then. It's still a small fraction of the US rate though - I was shocked to see the number of homeless people when I visited San Francisco. This change in Australia is partially due to changes in employment policies and partially due to reduction of benefits. Government policies have reduced unemployment benefits and tossed people out of mental institutions as well as allowing individual pay negotiation in some cases.
So I guess whether you allow employment policies like reverse auctions is a matter of "What kind of society do I want?" If you want a comfortable country where no-one suffers too much then you need more left-wing policies like minimum wages and strong welfare. If you want to encourage the profit making possibilities of a free market economy then you should allow policies like reverse actions and reduced welfare.
As a point of comparison the US spends about half its tax on the military. Australia spends about half its tax on welfare instead. The US allows employers to get people to bid themselves into poverty. Australia doesn't. As a result it should surprise no-one that Australia has a vastly lower rate of poverty than the US and much fewer incredibly rich people. The cost of some of these policies is pretty high taxes compared to the US. People here seem to be willing to pay that price to have a relatively egalitarian society.
Here everyone wins, the hospital gets their hard to fill slots staffed, the nurses can command a higher rate for those premium shifts.
The healthcare industry has to be creative to cover those hard to fill shifts. my mom works at an RN at a nursing home, the home had a hard time getting weekends covered, people would call in sick etc, so they offered her a sweet deal. She contracts to work every weekend, no excuses, for 2 15 hours shifts, inexchange they pay her for 40 hours. This way she gets her whole week free, the home gets the shift filed, and the residents win because they have a consistent presences every weekend with a nurse who knows them and their history. If they used a agency nurse or rotated the schedule, the patients would have different nurses every weekend. As anyone who has worked with alzheimers patients can attest, a very structured, consistent environmnet can help immensely,
Somebody gets it. Capitalism says nothing about restricting criminal intent. In fact, it encourages it. Capitalism rewards those who find innovative ways to compete and make more money than those they compete with. Crime is not a bad thing to the practitioner until they get caught, and even then, it may be a slap on the wrist, or a reprimand.
Communism and all the other *isms out there are all vulnerable to the same issues. If they were not, we never need the police, FBI or other agency. And, I believe if we did not need them, we would not tolerate their expense.
I can think of many examples where the lowest bid creates a problem. Can you imagine getting McService at a hospital? That truly scares me. Fries with your morphine?
Capitalism is a pie in the sky ideal. Ideals like that are good, as they define objectives to be debated and fought for. Never had any idea like this (Capitalsim, Socialism, Communism, Monarchy, ...) truly worked when applied 100%.
Think about what you are saying. The people who are typically the least qualified in job skills (which by definition of Capitalism) will be the ones with the most critical jobs, and in charge of you at a time when you potentially have no ability to question their actions, have a second opinion, or check with your legal expert before proceeding. Most muck-ups happen in the medical profession from inadequately trained/attentive practitioners. They are the ones who are typically at the bottom of the scale.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.