Underpaid Nurses Could Learn a Lesson From Teachers

The increasingly critical national shortage of nurses, a serious teacher shortage, the recent rash of nurses’ strikes in Northern California and teacher strikes in Chicago, Detroit and other cities combine to pose a riddle:

Why are both nurses and teachers so poorly paid, considering the urgent need for more of them, their high education levels, their heavy responsibilities and the usually stressful, difficult nature of their jobs?

The fact that almost all of the nation’s teachers and nurses are women provides a self-evident, if partial, answer.

True, women generally earn about 30% to 35% less than men, even in identical jobs, so it is wrong but not surprising that nurses and teachers, like most women, are relatively underpaid.

But even in our still too sexist society, the urgent demand for more nurses and the strong demand for more, better trained teachers should have pushed their annual average income higher than it is: around $25,000 nationwide.

Since their salaries have not gone up as might have been expected, clearly the economic “demand-pull” theory in our so-called free market economy isn’t working.

No one denies the demand. Last Sunday night, KCOP-TV aired what amounted to an hourlong commercial from hospitals trying to recruit nurses. No attention was paid to the main reasons there aren’t enough nurses: too little pay for a highly stressful job.

And there is another riddle: Why are teachers somewhat better off than nurses?

Teachers are required to have more education than most nurses, but then teachers do earn their inadequate salaries in nine months instead of the 12 that nurses must work to earn less than teachers.

Also, while teachers often work after school to deal with sometimes difficult students and parents, many nurses must frequently work with sick people and worried relatives in understaffed hospitals at nights, on weekends and holidays.

At least a partial reason for the advantage teachers have over nurses in salaries and working conditions is collective bargaining.

Relatively few nurses are covered by union contracts or even belong to an association or union of nurses. Only about 225,000 of the nation’s 1.5 million registered nurses belong to an AFL-CIO union or to the independent American Nurses Assn.

In contrast, almost all teachers belong either to the 1.9 million-member National Education Assn. or the 500,000-member AFL-CIO American Federation of Teachers.

Teachers, like members of most unions, strike only as an unwanted last resort when contract negotiations fail, but they do strike with just about as much frequency as employees in private industry.

But nurses’ strikes are a rarity.

There are many theories as to why nurses are far less unionized than teachers, less willing to challenge management.

Teachers had a tradition of being dominated by mostly male principals and superintendents, and in the past they proudly joined the profession, dedicating themselves to it as one of the most prestigious jobs open to women. They were usually respected by parents and students alike.

For years, they ignored the fact that they were falling far behind the average blue-collar factory workers in wages and job conditions, and their non-eatable prestige was slipping badly.

But by the early 1960s, teachers began waking up. They were given a choice: join the militant unionism of the AFL-CIO teachers’ union, the AFT, or remain with the much larger, anti-union National Education Assn.

The AFT appealed to their self-interest even as it offered continued concern for teaching as a profession. As a result, the AFT began attracting teachers in such numbers--especially in big cities--that the NEA was forced to reverse its policies and adopt those of the AFT.

NEA eliminated superintendents and school board officials as leaders of their organization, adopted collective bargaining for all teachers as a priority goal and accepted the need for strikes as a fact of life. The change has allowed NEA to remain the dominant organization for America’s teachers.

The source of any leadership is always mysterious, and there is no satisfactory reason that no one came up from the ranks of nurses to lead them as Albert Shanker, the articulate, imaginative president of the American Federation of Teachers, and his predecessors came up to lead teachers.

But, without strong leaders, the growth of collective bargaining among nurses was and still is proceeding at a far slower pace than among teachers.

True, there was the remarkable Florence Nightingale, the daughter of wealthy parents who became famous in the mid-1800s as an angel of mercy to soldiers during the Crimean War. The founder of modern nursing, she put service to others above any personal consideration. But then she could always go to Queen Victoria, her benefactor and friend, if she wanted something more than the wealth her family could provide.

However, she did not work to improve nurses’ wages or working conditions, or even suggest that such improvements were needed.

As the nursing profession grew, nurses became known as the “handmaidens of doctors.” Teachers were never handmaidens of any of their “superiors,” even if they did allow themselves to be dominated by males in executive school positions.

Even after they finally rejected their roles as “handmaidens,” nurses didn’t become militant unionists. Many were and still are treated almost as servants of hospital administrators and doctors. And, until a decade or so ago, most nurses were educated in hospital-based programs in which they were housed, clothed and fed as they learned. It’s surprising that any of them turned to unions since their benefactors, the hospitals, regarded that as an act of betrayal.

And even today, students are taught in nursing schools that it is unprofessional of them to join unions, says Kathy Sackman, president of United Nurses Assns. of California, which only recently affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Organizing activity among American nurses began in California, but many decades passed before there was any progress. The California Nurses Assn. was formed in 1907, but nurses in the Berkeley and Oakland area didn’t win union contracts until 40 years later.

And not much happened after that until 1966, when a series of nurses’ strikes in the San Francisco Bay Area won them significant improvements in wages and conditions.

It was not until 1974 that Congress finally gave nurses across the nation the same rights to unionize that other workers had won in 1935. Since then, their salaries have gone up at a more rapid rate than in earlier years. But they still have to fight for those raises, and hospital administrators still spend far more money to fight unionization than school administrators do.

Nurses and teachers must still be dedicated to their profession if they are to do their difficult jobs most effectively. But the jobs must provide the kind of incomes and working conditions that dedication deserves.

Wages Shrinking

There is a nationwide debate over efforts to give minimum wage workers around the country a little help by boosting the current $3.35 an hour, as Democrats in Congress have proposed. The national minimum will go up if Congress can overcome the strong opposition of President Reagan and most of organized business. Minimum wages in California are almost certain to get a modest hike soon, but that will be far below the amount needed to lift workers at this lowest wage level out of poverty.

As small as the increase will be, at least there is a debate about the justice of the current rate. But there ought to be a debate, too, about the wages of the average American worker.

One of the key arguments for the increase in the minimum is that it was set in 1981 and, since then, the buying power of $3.35 has been slashed 27% by inflation.

But inflation has also eroded the average worker’s buying power.

The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real average weekly earnings of workers dropped an additional 0.3% from June to July. This means that in the past 10 years, the ordinary worker’s buying power has fallen by a hefty 10.89%.

Unlike the decline of the living standard of minimum wage workers, a continued drop in the buying power of most workers cannot be halted by a vote in Congress, or action by individual states.

But there should be more serious debate about the unhappy consequences of the declining living standard of the entire nation even as we move to raise the minimum wagers out of their poverty.