Are these really the people that should be required to work so much? Isn’t their job about handling life and death daily? Wouldn’t we want exactly these people to come fully rested to work every single day and be fully staffed?
I don’t know if there are jobs with similar stakes that are so carelessly staffed and disgustingly paid.
I’m not okay with it but it’s the type of problem that can only be solved by them. They have to go on strike and protest.
In a vacuum, yes. The problem is that when, say, chip fabricators go on strike, orders for microchips don’t get fulfilled on time and the company loses money. When SAG goes on strike for months, movies get delayed, and people usually cheer them on in solidarity. When MEDICAL professionals go on strike en mass, people will die… Quickly, in some cases. People say they support us, and I get a free breakfast once a year at Denny’s during Nurse’s Week, but nobody’s going to cheer on the picket line outside when their dad or grandmother is INSIDE, sitting in their own poop, or not being fed, or having respiratory distress.
You don’t go into nursing for the money or easy work. You don’t even do it because it’s “just a job to pay the bills” because there’s way easier ways to make this little money. You do it to because you’re the kind of person who is more fulfilled by helping a stranger than by helping yourself, and those people are not ok with risking the life and safety of their patients over a shift differential. A LOT of nurses would cross the line to help them anyway, which would negate the whole effort… It sucks, but that’s it.
I’ve been a nurse for about 10 years now after getting out of the military, so I have some perspective on this, but I don’t know what the way forward is without letting a couple of vulnerable people die to catalyze change in the field.
I understand, but you guys are setting yourselves on fire to keep society warm.
In Japan when bus drivers go on strike they don’t stop the buses, but they stop taking bus fare from riders so the company doesn’t get paid. Maybe something involving medical notes so they can’t get billing codes.
That would be the perfect balance, but we’re not the ones taking the money like the bus drivers. Even if we were, they can always send a bill later. Messing with the notes would be falsifying medical records, which is one of the Cardinals sins of healthcare… and is also a crime.
Hey, regarding false medical notes, I’ve got a recently discovered whopper of falsehood. I’m going to keep this vague.
Patient suddenly can’t walk/stand, has very limited sensation in lower limbs. Goes to ER, spinal cord compression protocol clears and they are admitted. Long weekend of no progress. Patient leaves in a wheel chair, almost no change in symptoms.
Years later, they are collecting medical records for new doc and discover the notes from that stay in the hospital saying that all the symptoms spontaneously resolved before discharge. Wtf
Miracled! I wonder why they would lie about it, unless money?
Nurses can and do strike. People support them because organized nurses who can enforce collective decisions provide the best care.
There was just a victory in New York:
https://www.ajmc.com/view/historic-nyc-nursing-strike-ends-with-3-year-contract-wins
https://www.myamericannurse.com/from-applause-to-action-why-new-yorks-nursing-strike-matters-for-patients-nursing-students-and-the-future-of-the-nursing-profession/
I’m aware this has happened a few times, but I don’t fully understand how. I keep meaning to look into it further, but I’ve never seen a detailed explanation of who was caring for people while this was going on. Maybe it’s buried in one of those articles somewhere, but I don’t have time to read through them right now.
Nurses strike all the time.
Here is a list of some strikes in US only. 2026: https://nurse.org/articles/nurse-strikes-list/, 2025: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/7-healthcare-strikes-in-2025/
Sometimes they maintain minimum care. There is advance notice provided. Nurses can also do things like provide care but not chart it in the correct way to get “counted” by their funding model. So the employer loses money while patient care is if anything improved.
We have to vote. They can’t be left alone.
We vote, but it’s not enough.
Do you? Do we? We currently consistently have about 20-50% of the population in Europe voting for far-right to conservative - parties that don’t give 2 shits about medical staff unless they require treatment. And even then, some of them don’t care about them because “do your job and stop whining”.
And that’s just the people that vote. At municipal level the voter participation is abysmal.
It’s the same situation in the US. My own mother votes for the most vile Republicans against our interests because she’s been so stuffed with hate and tribalism from Fox news all she cares about is that dopamine hit from “my team is winning”. No amount of reasoning will overcome that addictive hit of dopamine.
It’s a carefully manufactured propaganda machine funded by people with power we could only dream about reaching out from here to the EU.
Even the youth here in the south vote against their interests because abortion and immigrants bad jesus good. Education has been dismantled and even if they knew what was going on our districts are so gerrymandered it probably wouldn’t matter.
People need to be inoculated against billionaire propoganda, but how do you do that when they control the media and schools?
We’re not going to get anything done done within the system because they control the system. Strikes and violence or extremely disruptive protesting are going to have to happen.