I just found this web page, entitled “The Hard Truth about Becoming A Certified Nursing Assistant” – an interesting title, given that it’s from a company which helps people take their CNA tests, but it claims to be giving honest answers about things.
The page notes that the median annual salary for CNAs is $26,000 – meaning, of course, that half of CNAs make less than that. If one were to assume a full-time position, and following the general rule-of-thumb of 2000 hours in a work year, that equates to an hourly wage of $13.
It’s interesting that they use median instead of mean. If 51 people make 26,000 and 49 people make 150,000 dollars, the median would still be 26,000. Median is just the middle number. Granted the mean can also be misleading, with the same numbers someone might expect to get paid closer to 80 or 90 thousand, but it seems ‘average’ is more often used.
Because people will always charge what the market will bear. If it was $5 to go and see a concert or a football game, they’d sell out right away. However, for $10 or $15 or $20, they’ll still sell out, or be close to it. They’ll continually raise the price until they get to the point of diminishing returns.
This is why you can, and it’s important to, vote with your money.
That’s true but salary distributions are rarely bimodal in this way. The reason mean is not a good measure is because it gets increased by outliers on the high end, which gives a misleading idea of salary distribution. Outliers don’t affect the median very much.
The OP mixes in registered nurses with nursing “aides” (do you mean nursing assistant?). Like many professions, there will be varying levels of skills and experience required to do a job, and salary commensurate with that skill and experience. Perhaps because the CNA certification is relatively easy to acquire and of modest cost, the salaries for CNA positions are also modest.
My daughter plans to get a CNA certification on her way to becoming a registered nurse - it will allow her to get real-world on the job experience working in the nursing field before getting her degree, but she is using it only as a stepping stone.
The thing that’s missing in this discussion is quality. If low pay means that a company cannot get enough employees to make the product they can sell, normal supply and demand kicks in. But here - and in other cases - they can still fill the beds but the quality of care goes down. (And/or the stress of the job goes up.) In the long term perhaps reviews of the supplier might hurt, but in general there is an expectation of a certain level of care and other factors far outweigh the service provided by nursing aides. (Like quality of doctors, and sometimes not even then.)
So the employer has an incentive to skimp on care to maintain profits. Plus if all suppliers have the same issues, skimping on care might not even make you worse than your competitors.
Nursing assistants, even certified ones, are not much better than menial laborers. They are the kind of jobs that should be paying close to minimum wage. As has been noted, there’s not much of a barrier to becoming one. They don’t require much of any skill set other than to be able to put up with bodily functions and irascible patients, and there’s generally going to be something like the latter in most jobs at this level. There’s a shortage of them in the same sense there’s a shortage of people available to work at, say, the car wash or Wendy’s. As unemployment decreases, the crunch on employers is felt the hardest on the jobs that don’t pay much, because those people are most likely to leave for a higher paying job. Employers are generally willing to hire people for the going rate if they can find someone sufficient, but it’s most likely the case that employers can’t find anyone who will work for the money that such a job creates in profit for the employer. Most places probably have some sort of work that someone could help them with, but it’s not something that’s terribly important. It might improve the bottom line a little, but not enough to justify paying someone what people who are willing to do it are asking.
I find it interesting that the statistics say that most nursing assistants are women, because I’ve been in the hospital for a few weeks on various occasion, and all of the nursing assistants I remember were male. Perhaps I just assumed all the female ones were RNs, or at least astute enough that they could have been working on it, while the males were such that I imagine it would be hard for them to find anything higher paying.
This is especially relevant in an industry like health care, where the customers (patients) don’t have much control over expenses or purchases.
You generally don’t ‘choose’ which hospital to go to – you are directed to one by your doctor (or your insurance plan), and you go there. Very little consumer choice involved. And if you aren’t satisfied with your nursing care, you can’t dispute the amount of the bill. Most cases, the bill was already paid by your insurance company – often you don’t even get to see the bill or know how much it was.
It’s difficult for supply-and-demand to work effectively, when:
the customer can’t go to another supplier (without much difficulty)
the customer doesn’t even know what price he’s paying
even if known, the customer can’t really negotiate on the price.
So even if customers (patients) would like nurses to be paid more (and hospital administrators less), they don’t have an effective way to communicate that in the marketplace.
If you compare medicine to the military, doctors are basically officers, nurses are NCOs, and nurse aides are junior enlisted ranks like E-2 to E-4. (And indeed, a lot of both doctors and nurses start out in the military.) As others have pointed out, within the field of nursing, there are varying levels with corresponding pay, and a nurse’s aide is at the bottom of it. It’s a starting point for working up to a higher level.
This is also true of exotic dancers and escorts. these jobs require little in the way of skills, but their prices are bid up because there is a shortage since most women don’t want to work in those careers. The same should be true of people who handle feces for a living. And it is true! Except employers have just made a conscious decision to just do without rather than pay more. I just wish they’d stop complaining about it and asking for government to find a way to get them more cheap labor. Either pay the price or do without, but whining is so childish.
No, it is pretty ironclad. The law says that, the lower the wages you offer for nursing assistants, the fewer people will be motivated to work as nursing assistants.
What it doesn’t say is that this will result in hospitals offering higher wages, any more than it says the result will be workers deciding to accept the lower wages. There are constraints on hospitals raising the wages (the size of the budget, the other things they need to buy with it, the sensitivity of demand for their own services, should they raise prices) and there are constraints on what wages the worker will accept (the need to eat, the need to pay rent, the level of wages the worker can earn doing some other job). The law of supply and demand does not magically remove these constraints.
Yeah, the superstars are a lot more than that, but I’d bet even teachers would be pleased as punch to make even 10% of the big four minimums, never mind the aide working in your mum’s nursing home.
It is much, much harder to become a professional sports player than to become a teacher. Therefore the potential supply of candidates is far smaller in the one case than in the other.
There are roughly twelve thousand professional sports competitors in the US, making a median salary of about $47K per year. (Cite.). Median salary for teachers in the USis about $58K, and there are about 3.2 million of them. So your figure of about 10% of the salary of top-level football, basketball, baseball, and hockey players is not far off.
Just to single this one out, because it’s the one I’ve been hearing about lately: This not the minimum salary for baseball players, it’s the minimum salary for MLB players. Big difference.
You started this thread in General Questions. Did you really want an answer to your question, or was it a rhetorical question intended to make a point?
I’ll be wiling to bet that being an exotic dancer takes a whole lot more skill than you realize (both physically and mentally) and I’m quite sure the price you pay for an escort is artificially driven up, at least in part, because it’s illegal pretty much everywhere. There’s also a stigma attached to both of those professions.
The first cite I ran across put the median yearly income for an exotic dancer at just under 50k and I’d be surprised to find reliable data on what an escort makes in a year, but I think you can count on it coming down if there were no laws against it.
As for a shortage, why would you say there’s a shortage? How do you know? I’ve never seen lines outside the strip club doors. Do you have something to show that it more women wanted to be exotic dancers that the community would support it, financially. That is, if my city has 10 strip clubs, paying dancers 50k each. If suddenly twice as many people wanted to work in that industry, would my city sustain 20 strip clubs? Or would they same 10 be able to stay open and reduce the salary to, say, 25-30k?
IOW, maybe there’s not a shortage of escorts or exotic dancers, maybe there’s just the right amount, they’re paying what they should be getting paid and people who are entertaining by them are happy with what they’re paying.
That is to say, sometimes everything is in balance.
As I brought up earlier, is there any data to support a shortage of workers in either of those professions? I’ve never looked, my only data point is that a strip club I drive past nearly every day very rarely has a ‘Entertainers Wanted’ sign up, and when they do it’s probably for ‘male entertainers’ at least half the time.
It does to some extent because our moral values often determine what we find economically valuable. Again, I cite the example of the parents who are outraged about the new $100 a year property tax assessment for their children’s schools while, at the same time, spend many times more on things that they obviously deem more valuable to them.
We have new billion dollar stadiums that are, at least in part, funded by taxpayers while, at the same time, those same communities have teachers with low pay working in schools lacking supplies. That’s a reflection of VALUES.
Imagine a survivor of an airplane crash is struggling through the desert, trying to make it back to civilization. He’s about to collapse due to exposure and expire from thirst, when a Bedouin sees him and says that he will sell a gallon of water for $100,000.
I imagine that you would see this as a great example of the market working perfectly, in which prices rise due to scarcity. A glass half full view on whether the poor wretch should live or die, as it were.
It is an example of the market working. It is not a good example of society working. We expect different outcomes from society than we do from markets.
How would it be better for society if the poor wretch dies of thirst?
The answer for the OP is that there is a ceiling to how much someone can be paid. Businesses in a competitive market can not pay people more than their marginal productivity. The market will bid up the wages of the job until that point and then no further.
