People still work in literal coal mines, and their pay is still < $31/hour.

This discussion is about an effect at the margins. The marginal nurse that decides to quit, the low-seniority teacher that is paid less than their peers for the same work.

When the canary dies in a coal mine, everyone is in danger. But when working conditions worsen, only those employees at the margins (close to retirement, low seniority, worse than average assignment) will leave.

The question is whether there is some exponential effect on service from decreasing kitchen/nursing/teaching staff. Those fields all look like they have linear degradation of service to me.

https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/coal-miner/united-st...

> The only solution will be to raise compensation for teachers and bring labor into the industry and, well, the failure to raise teaching salaries is maybe the single greatest of example of the divergence between what people publicly support and what they actually vote for.

It's hard to read sentences like that and wonder "what more do you want?" Yes teachers should get paid more. The average teacher in the SFUSD gets paid ~$84K, which is clearly not enough for the city. But the district has an annual budget of 1.3 billion dollars for less than 50K students. Maybe the district should spend more of the money it already has on teacher salaries instead of wasting money and time on stupid / mismanaged projects[1][2][3].

[1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/12/san-francisco-unified-schoo... [2] https://missionlocal.org/2022/10/firm-awarded-no-bid-contrac... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/arts/design/san-francisco...

Related:

Bad service is a sign of a better world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41674275 - Sept 2024

(referenced and written by blog author in post above)

My partner worked as a nurse for almost a decade. In the end they were in psychiatry, most chill job you can get as a nurse if you don't want to go into management. No manual labor, only bringing people their meds and writing down what they did all day. It still sucked. The pay was bad and the night-shifts and constantly covering for sick coworkers took their toll.

In the end they switched to a study assistant job. Better pay and they can work whenever they like, even from home for half of the tasks.

Is there a useful way to separate the effects that wages not keeping up with inflation has on workforce retention has from the effects that customer/student/patient violence towards staff has on workforce retention?

My gut instinct tells me that the latter would be a much bigger driver of resignations but I'm not involved in these industries so maybe the former matters more to them.

Probably something that can be learned from this information, but I doubt the conclusion the author arrived at is correct.

Labor shortages in nursing, cooks, and teachers. But unemployment increasing since 2022. Sounds like it might work itself out?

And yet school administration and hospital administration are making more money than ever. There's no labor shortage, there's a pay shortage.

What I find very interesting about the examples here is they cover the whole spectrum of government-managed to free market.

Most teachers are employed by state-owned schools, and as far as I understand, they're very often unionized in the US. Nursing is mostly private but regulated, probably with some mix of non-profits / government thrown in. Restaurants are as free market as it gets, there are both large chains and small restaurants, there's lots of competition, most customers have more than one option, reviews exist and a lot of people are repeat customers, making it hard to overpromise, underdeliver and stay in business.

I don't have the answers as to why this is a problem, but clearly "evil capitalists", "mismanaged government", "underregulation" or "overregulation" are not it.

(2022)

> If the daily threads at on r/nursing subreddit are even mildly representative, the status quo in nursing is unsustainable

Call me a skeptic but every career subreddit is dominated by the whiniest complainers imaginable (easily lapping even the HN commenters who froth at the mouth at the thought of RTO).

Using this as a key point of an article seems flimsy at best.

> Personally, I’m betting on two out of the three, but I’m not telling you which two.

Also lol at this.