On Jan. 7, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) released a press release outlining the grievances its leaders believe justify a strike against Oregon’s largest healthcare company, Providence Health & Services.
AFT — an umbrella organization whose affiliates include the Oregon Nurses Association (ONA) — cited “dangerous understaffing, patient safety and fair wages” as the driving causes of this strike, which began promptly at 6am on Friday, Jan. 10.
According to the union, a recent internal survey allegedly discovered that patients in Oregon don’t like waiting in long wait times, poor frontline staff service, or short visits with their healthcare provider. This revelation suggests to a problem with staffing — which it demands Providence solve if its leaders want to avert a strike.
As the old saying goes: When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
But given organized labor’s dubious track record with respect to problem-solving, the real answer almost certainly lies elsewhere.
Faced with a similar staffing shortage in his state’s education system, New Jersey’s legislature and Gov. Phil Murphy manufactured Act 1669. Did the legislation try to encourage students to enter the teaching profession by making it more prestigious?
Just the opposite.
New Jersey leaders removed the requirement for educators to pass a basic skills test called the Praxis Core Test, which both the AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) have consistently demonized for preventing a diverse workforce. In their eyes, an arbitrary classification of diversity is more important than ensuring competency in the workforce.
Applying the same uninspired logic, ONA evidently wants to solve Oregon’s understaffing issue by forcing Providence to reduce hiring requirements.
Will the wellness of Oregonians being treated by this new crop of manifestly unqualified nurses be put at risk? Certainly. But more Providence nurses means more dues-paying members for the union.
The reality that always eludes these people is that lowering barriers does not magically produce a pool of well-educated, highly competent employees to choose from. All it does is allow people who’ve fallen below the required metric to take jobs they aren’t able to perform.
This has nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with incentivizing mediocrity, since lowering these benchmarks allows the worst in the class to work right alongside the best.
Who cares about applying yourself in school? The unions will just keep dumbing down requirements until you look overqualified.
Not to mention that pushing for the hiring of unqualified healthcare workers will arbitrarily inflate the wages of everyone involved. It hardly seems fair to pay a good nurse and a bad nurse the same salary, but that’s how AFT and NEA define “equity.”
Two predictions: One, ONA will pull its nurses off the job, causing patients to suffer needlessly. And two, it won’t matter anyway because patient care was never the point.
All that really matters is lining the pockets of union leaders and their elected accomplices by using all that lovely new dues money to ensure the cycle keeps repeating itself endlessly.
