Here's my take on the nursing shortage. Nursing, like teaching, is a
highly skilled job. However, this job pays like an unskilled job. Why
is that? Well, in the past there was a pool of labor that could not
get other work and remain "respectable". 50 years ago, a middle-class
woman who wanted to work outside the home could either be a nurse or a
teacher. So these professions had an artificially inflated labor pool
to draw from.
Nowadays, >50% of med school graduates are women. Before, they would
have been nurses. We need to change our societal expectaions of
nursing and stop thinking of it as unskilled labor.
The other problem is that market forces can't really work on the
nursing shortage, since so many nursing jobs are public sector. They'd
rather let a job go unfilled than pay the neccesary wages.
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Darryl
Think Galactically -- Act Terrestrially
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