Nurses should not gatekeep their pay. When I polled our YouTube subscribers, 74% agreed. Sharing our pay leads to better wages for all of us.
What our poll found
I asked our subscribers on YouTube if nurses should gatekeep their pay.
A whopping 74% said we should not. Only 13% said we should. Another 13% said they did not know.
I feel proven right. The people against sharing pay are a loud few. Most nurses are quiet, but they want us to talk about pay. It helps all of us.
Sharing pay helps every nurse
Sharing our pay does lead to better pay for all of us.
If I ran a hospital, I would love it if my nurses kept quiet about pay. Then I could pay them less than other hospitals do.
When nurses talk about pay, hospitals have to pay fair wages. And when nurses know they are paid fairly, they are more likely to stay. That means less turnover and better patient care. Everyone wins.
The downsides
Sharing pay does have some downsides.
At hospitals with no union, it can cause jealousy. Some nurses may learn that their coworkers make a lot more or less than they do.
This is mostly true for nurses at the top of the pay scale, like travel nurses. Their pay can get squeezed, and they may feel like their wages are stuck.
On the other hand, nurses at the bottom of the pay scale are now seeing raises. Talking about pay helps them speak up and ask for fair pay.
Some nurses tried to get me fired
When Monica and I moved to California, we joined the local nurses’ union. We also started talking about our wages on YouTube. A few nurses tried to get me fired for it.
They said our talk about pay would hurt the union’s chances of getting better raises in our contract talks.
It did not work. Federal law lets us talk about our pay without fear of being punished by our employers.
In the end, we got one of the best raises in the union’s history in our most recent contract.
California shows it works
Nurses in Northern California are the highest paid in the country. That is not luck. It comes from strong union contracts and open talk about pay.
Other states now try to copy the nurse union contracts they see in California. They see the good it does and want the same for their nurses.
I interviewed a nurse union rep from Florida who told me they model their contract talks on Northern California nurses. Because of that, he said, his hospital now has the highest wages of any private hospital in Florida. You can watch it in my interview with a Florida nurse union rep.
So let’s be open about our pay. Let’s help each other. Together, we can make a difference. To see what nurses actually earn, look at one nurse’s $21K paycheck and net pay at the top California hospitals.
Your next move
See what you’d take home, then make the move
Map My Pay shows what nurses take home after taxes and rent at 465+ hospitals and in 21,000+ cities. It’s the app I co-founded so you can compare cities before you pack a single box.
The Nurses to Riches Accelerator is the plan Monica and I used to go from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California: license, city, hospital, and what to do with the money after.
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Written by Jason, RN. I went from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California and paid off $128K of debt in under a year. I share our numbers in the Nurses to Riches newsletter and on YouTube.