TX Bans Local Nurses from Quitting to Work FEMA Crisis Contracts in State

https://nurse.org/articles/texas-bans-nurses-from-in-state-crisis-contracts/

by SQL2219 • 5 years ago

88 74 5 years ago

“Small government”

klyrs2• 5 years ago

I was thinking "Liberty." With vaccine mandates banned, I don't expect out-of-state nurses to clamor for this opportunity...

treeman79• 5 years ago

Lot of fired nurses around the country looking for work…

belltaco• 5 years ago

Like not allowing Tesla to sell cars without going through a money grubbing annoying dealership.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

Or legal marijuana.

readthenotes1• 5 years ago

Small federal government. For some reason (1), small State government seems to be a entirely different concept.

(1)I'm guessing the bribe money is better that way

Mountain_Skies2• 5 years ago

Or people simply prefer government that's closer to them.

freedomben• 5 years ago

As a person who has lived in many red states, this is generally how it is for some reason. Many people here actually get mad when I point it out, but after giving half a dozen good examples it's hard for them to deny it.

FTR I'm not taking a position on small vs. big government, I'm just sensitive to and OCD about pointing out hypocrisy when I see it.

vkou2• 5 years ago

Given how little Texas legislators get paid, I don't think you can make a living as one without supplementing your income with them. The cashier at Chick-Fil-A takes home more than you do.

mfer• 5 years ago

Some context… due to nursing shortages, many places are giving great bonuses and pay rates to new people and temporary help. Those who stay aren’t being compensated the same. This is leading to a lot of people changing jobs. Sometimes to work down the street. There is far more demand for nurses than there is supply.

hexxagone• 5 years ago

Isn't it how free markets work ?

SQL22193• 5 years ago

nursing wage arbitrage.

hindsightbias• 5 years ago

As long as “free” means you can’t partake because you already work in the state.

burnished2• 5 years ago

Not in Texas!

giantg23• 5 years ago

Sounds like software developer markets (and others) right now.

ashtonkem• 5 years ago

It’s funny how selective free market thinkers can be on these things.

dantheman• 5 years ago

In general that's how free markets work, but medicine is definitely not a free market and FEMA isn't a customer.

voakbasda2• 5 years ago

Not a free market. Regulatory capture allows the nursing industry to ensure that there will always be a shortage, to allow their members to line their pockets.

lugged• 5 years ago

Awful title.

They're saying stimulus money must be used to secure out of state hires because they don't have enough nurses in state.

Hiring from the existing pool doesn't create a net improvement on the total nurses in state so they're saying you can't be hired with this money if you currently or recently worked for hospitals in state.

Nothing to do with banning quitting.

klyrs2• 5 years ago

The article does mention that. Also mentions that nurses are significantly underpaid and quitting in droves. Raising pay to compensate the existing nurses would reduce this churn, but they'd rather keep local wages down and let non-resident nurses get the federal funding.

jws• 5 years ago

It might be reasonable to say the state stimulus money must be used to import nurses, but using the federal stimulus money to raid nurses from the other states seems morally dubious.

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

Nothing to do with banning quitting.

You're not supposed to cut the sentence in half!

You can quit in general, but not to move to these jobs. The full action of "quit X to get job Y" is banned.

mike_d• 5 years ago

According to Indeed, the average wage for an RN in Texas is $35.82. The new contracts pay $100/hr and $150/hr for overtime.

According to the staffing agency you have to have not been employed by a hospital in Texas for the last 30 days. for an almost 3x wage bump I'd be shocked if some nurses didn't decide to sit on the sidelines for a month.

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Or quit, work a traveling nurse contract out of state for a month, and then come back on contract.

A nurse friend quit the VA and is making $10k/week traveling.

bluedino• 5 years ago

My brother in law is a traveling nurse, he has shown me the 10k/week jobs in Alaska but the others seem to be 4-6k

fn-mote• 5 years ago

I'd be shocked if some nurses didn't decide to sit on the sidelines for a month.

Texas residents are banned from the new contracts.

Sitting on the side sounds like roulette... presumably those who are mobile will leave the state for other lucrative contracts, and the rest will work "within the system" (probably wishing for a stronger union while they campaign for a slice of the pie).

toast0• 5 years ago

I'm no healthcare forecaster, but if the pay for new work is currently 3x and the state isn't doing much to improve conditions, in 30 days there's likely to still be a lot of demand for new work.

If I were a nurse, I think I'd have a hard time with sense of duty and sitting out, so a one month traveling job in another state (if possible, one that's doing better at vaccination) for a few weeks would feel better than sitting around, but at the same time, when the government incentives say to sit around for 30 days if you want to get paid more, who am I to not follow incentives.

Omniusaspirer2• 5 years ago

Austin based Texas travel RN here- flying out Friday for a 13 week contract in a tropical locale. Compensation is:

  -60 hours a week guaranteed (even if sent home because not needed, get paid)

  -Hourly (<40 hr): $95.00/hr

  -OT: $177.00/hr

  -Untaxed weekly stipends: $1,785

  -$500 relocation + $500 for doing some online training modules

  -All holidays at OT rate, callback at OT rate with minimum 2 hours

  -$9,125/wk minimum gross

I'm told that more overtime will almost certainly be available should I care to pick up (~$2100 per 12 hr shift). I have an associates in nursing and 2 years of work experience in the last 3 years.

Happy to answer any questions as I know this sector is pretty outside of the normal HN discourse and there's been some interesting employment trends since the pandemic began.

fy20• 5 years ago

How much training do you need to qualify for this position? In Europe nurses typically study for 3 or 4 years, and then you are lucky to get much over minimum wage... In Western Europe, €30k/year would be a good salary for a nurse.

SQL22193• 5 years ago

A lot of this "shortage" can be attributed to the firing of nurses who refuse the vaccine, which will probably only increase in the next few months.

meepmorp2• 5 years ago

99% of nursing jobs survived the mandates, though

JaimeThompson• 5 years ago

Can you provide sources that support your position?

SQL22193• 5 years ago

1,400 workers cut loose from Northwell Health https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/northwell-health-cuts-2-25...

csense• 5 years ago

How exactly do you ban someone from quitting their job? Like, if they don't want to do it anymore, how do you prevent them from just not showing up, or showing up and sitting around and refusing to do anything work related?

Also, isn't a job you're not allowed to quit basically a form of slave labor?

comex• 5 years ago

If you read the article, what's banned is working FEMA contracts if you recently (in the last 30 days) quit from a Texas hospital, or are a Texas resident. Nobody is literally banned from quitting.

wink• 5 years ago

In defense of the person you replied to, it's so littered with acronyms and things I've never heard of (I'm not from the US) I was only 80% sure I understood it correctly.

detaro• 5 years ago

It's clearly about banning them from taking up specific new jobs if they already work(ed) in Texas, so they don't have a motivation to quit an existing to job to switch to those, not literally banning them from quitting.

CamperBob2• 5 years ago

That's the "libertarian"-influenced Republican government in Texas at work. Small government... small enough to fit into your bedroom, your doctor's office, and your workplace.

magwa101• 5 years ago

For the "live free" state they sure do take away a lot of freedoms.

chroem-2• 5 years ago

Can you provide sources that support your position?

otterley• 5 years ago

Texas keeps trying to ban abortion every which way it can. It is also trying to make voting more difficult instead of more convenient. This has been all over the news in the past year; sources aren't needed to support well-known facts.

salawat2• 5 years ago

That's New Hampshire. Common mistake.

Texas' state motto is "Friendship".

In Texas, Friends are people there when you need them, and politely distant, minding their own business when you don't.

Whom "you need" is referring to there is a perennial topic of conversation, and is generally a reliable seed of spirited dialectic.

burnished2• 5 years ago

>“This surge is nothing like anything we’ve ever seen,” the THA said. “Hospitals are doing everything in their power to figure this out. Staffing is a critical issue and this spike is unsustainable without help. Many hospitals have already idled non-essential services and are offering bonuses and incentive pay just to keep staff.”

THA is Texas Hospital Association. It is kind of absurd reading this because the nation as a whole has been short on nurses for years and its been well forecasted as a problem for some time. Add on top of it a pandemic that is treated as a political problem, at this point a very clear problem with burnout and working conditions, and this little piece of fluff just becomes absurd.

Gigachad• 5 years ago

Why would you bother planning ahead when you can just have the government change the rules of the game after you sit on your ass and pocket the savings for a year.

giantg23• 5 years ago

Isn't the government supposed to be the one preventing anticompetitive behavior?

sanp• 5 years ago

I thought Texas was all about individual choice / responsibility. /s.

salawat2• 5 years ago

It's been getting diluted by the Californian diaspora. Also, I wouldn't put it passed the People running things who brought us the ERCOT disaster to also have managed to make a time bomb out of this. The medical infra down here is garbage compared to the rest of the country.

Interestingly though, it'd be Texan as hell to make the most of them Fedbux. Tell you what.

igetspam2• 5 years ago

Are you high? This is all Abbott. California immigration has nothing to do with the BS we're going through. Governor death only cares about free enterprise when it's in support of religious right wing ideologies and will gladly stifle businesses that don't follow his perverted version of conservatism. He's a trump thumper with eyes on the white house and thinks personal choice is not something to afforded to the left, the center or the moderate right.

heartbreak• 5 years ago

The medical infra down here is garbage compared to the rest of the country.

My experience in this extremely large state is limited, but I know that the medical infrastructure in Houston is the best in the world.

Houston’s Texas Medical Center is the world’s largest medical complex by several measures: number of hospitals, number of physicians, square footage and patient volume.
Scientists at TMC-affiliated institutions, most notably Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Methodist, and MD Anderson are advancing life science breakthroughs across dozens of research centers and more than 300 research laboratories.

And that's just the Texas Medical Center.

https://www.houston.org/houston-data/health-care-houston

StLCylone• 5 years ago

Now government overreach, apparently.

Herodotus38• 5 years ago

I would point out that this article is from August 2021, which is not that long ago, but in the realm of COVID news, is actually significant.

denkmoon• 5 years ago

Incredible how quickly legislation can be enacted when it involves limiting workers options and opportunities.

dylan6044• 5 years ago

Where is it the government's purview to say that a person can or cannot work somewhere? If the employer says they have the skills required to fulfill the position, where does the gov't come into play?

xref• 5 years ago

Well Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union in 1981 because it was “a peril to safety” is a famous example of the government saying when and where you have to work

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Con...

dylan6044• 5 years ago

It was just as moronic then as it is now. Also, I don't believe these are even close to being the same. ATC works for FAA which is a gov't organization. Healthcare, as we all know in the US, is not a gov't organization. Gov't telling private citizens which private companies they can/cannot work for is asinine.

anomie31• 5 years ago

I'm so confused, I really thought Texas had at-will employment?

voakbasda2• 5 years ago

My girlfriend got an associates degree last year in the hope of going to nursing school. However, she was actively dissuaded from even applying. It seems that competition for spots is so fierce that students with straight A’s may not get into the programs in the area. Some students retake critical classes three or four times to get enough “points” to compete.

So the shortage is entirely caused by academia and industry. Thank you, regulatory capture. They don’t want more nurses.

TX Bans Local Nurses from Quitting to Work FEMA Crisis Contracts in State

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