New York’s healthcare industry has taken a rather troubling turn due to the nurses’ strike, which involves 15,000 nurses fighting for better working conditions and other basic rights. To make matters worse, however, one nurse has revealed that New York‘s hospitals are now seeking travel nurses and are even offering them as much as $11,000 per week in pay to plug the gap left by regular nurses on strike.
TikTok user and travel nurse Tim Blechle, aka tim_blechle, is the healthcare professional in question, and on January 21, he posted a rather worrying industry trend on TikTok. Apparently, numerous travel nurses like him are now getting contractual offers of up to $11,000/week for a few weeks of work in New York. Blechle, however, has stated that he didn’t take the offer, stating “I would love tha money but I support my colleagues more.”
Of course, Blechle is just one travel nurse, and there are many of them, so it’s not clear just how much solidarity they have, and some would likely take the offer. The result of too many travel nurses simply accepting the offer could lead to the nurses’ strike losing some of its leverage against the three hospital systems in New York.
Meanwhile, negotiations between the New York State Nurses Association and the aforementioned hospital systems in New York are not exactly going well. No deal or compromise has been reached, and the 15,000 nurses on strike are now on their second week on the picket line. For the record, the nurses’ union is demanding better staffing, improved safety, and health benefits while hospitals continue to reject the demands.
People Online Are Scratching Their Heads at the Offer
Tim Blechle’s video has since gone viral, reaching more than a million views across different social media platforms. Many viewers were shocked at how much New York hospitals are willing to pay the travel nurses, leading to confounded criticisms toward the system, “So they CAN pay nurses more, they just won’t…” while another said, “its wild they’ll pay 11k a week for travel nurses but wont hire more nurses to avoid a strike.”
Some commenters have crunched the numbers, and it appears the travel nurse offers could be cheaper for the hospitals in the long run since the travel nurse stints only last for a few weeks. “Still cheaper then a lifetime of paying a 25 percent raise,” according to a commenter. However, other nurses in the comment section of the TikTok video pointed out that the travel nurse shift on offer is quite hellish as well, “5×12 hour shifts! Hell no.”
“26 year nurse here, you’re gonna be taking on VERY unsafe ratios, working an ungodly amount of hours and if one thing goes wrong, your nursing license gets thrown under the bus. It’s not worth it,” claims one nurse regarding the $11k/week travel nurse job. The elephant in the room, of course, is that the healthcare industry CEOs are still paid a lot more. “They also don’t have to pay their CEO 75,000/hr 🙄,” jokes a critic.
