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News :: Miscellaneous |
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County Nursing Home Workers Need A Living Wage |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Lehman
(No verified email address) |
25 Mar 2001
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The following letter to the editor was published in the Sunday, March 25, 2001 Champaign News-Gazette.
The apparently still have an very authoritarian style editor working letters over to suit themselves. In numerous letters over the year, I have already used the capitalized "Living Wage" form, but they must feel that gives Living Wage as an issue too much signifigance. They always reduce my caps to lower case. It's sort of a case of art imitating life, where ideas a devalued with "minimum English" values to demonstrate their support for as minimal a wage as possible. |
To the Editor,
A recent article (March 8) detailed how the new Champaign County Nursing Home administrator hopes to reduce turnover and fill empty positions at the home. He wants to achieve full staffing by relying less on temporary agencies (which cost the home $641,000 last year) and offering a package of nominal financial incentives.
While he seems to be making a little progress, the program is unlikely to solve the real problem. Staff at the home simply needs to be paid more, so that they have a real incentive to stay. The Champaign County Living Wage Association has calculated that it would only take approximately $250,000 to bring ALL county employees up to a Living Wage of $8.20 an hour.
While there is not a one-for-one correlation between bringing all county employees up to Living Wage and the amount spent on outside staffing at the home, doing so would go a long way toward overcoming the problems created by the previous administration’s penny-wise and pound-foolish policy, which was mainly designed to undermine union support among nursing home employees.
It makes far more sense than complaining about troubles in retaining employees, who need to leave the staff to obtain jobs that pay enough to support their families. I would also suggest that raising the unrealistically low wages paid would be far more acceptable to the union than passing out funny money to be spent at the "company store" and "lottery tickets," which seem to form the core of the proposed incentive plan. The money is there if we can waste $641,000 on union-busting, but are unwilling to spend $250,000 on Living Wages.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL |
