finland hates nurses drama pt eleventybillion

[cimorene]

So nurses in Finland are in short supply because they don't make enougn money, full-time, to like, afford houses and cars and families and the kinds of things that your average Finnish waitress can afford. Oddly enough they're unhappy with that and there's been months of drama. They're not allowed by law to go on strike so they've quit en masse instead.

Now the reigning government is working overtime to draft a new law to force them to go back to work instead of paying them. I hope all of them have already moved to Norway and it's too late, the bastards.

And I'm really loathing this fuckhead Stefan Wallin dude.

-Why is it so hard to give nurses more money?

- I have sometimes imagined that politics are a little bit more complicated than that everything can simply be solved with more money, but maybe I've been wrong about that.

öakljfdsöas. The opposition's position is that forced labour is unconstitutional and a grave trespass of people's fundamental citizen's rights, but the government says that "the right to life is more important than the right to quit your job".

Well, you know, it is, and I would have a little more sympathy for that position if those two alternatives were the only two in play and were in direct opposition, like in some imaginary world where people quitting was like, lowering the guillotine. But since there's the entire governmental-medical complex and the entire, you know, governmental spending and taxation complex in between, I'm inclined to look a little cynically on claims like that from people who are simultaneously supporting spending money on other things which are presumably also less important than the right to life.

Comments

[vass]

...Just wow.

The right to life: I do not think it means what they think it means.

[lexandros.livejournal.com]

It's a LOT of money they are asking. And if they get it, the communities are legally obligated to give a raise of equal value to others as well. My mother, who is a 'perhepäivähoitaja' and my aunt who isn't a "full nurse" but pretty much does the same job as nurses only gets paid even LESS, would both be entitled to a big raise. Most of the communities quite simply won't have the money. By asking so much more money, the nurses won't get any more staff hired to hospitals for a long time. And it's the lack of staff which has been the major issue in hospitals - this of course isn't the nurses' fault but the communities' for not granting any funds in time.

But yes, of course I agree with you on the idiocy of making the situation so strongly oppositional. Even if strikes always are oppositional, there really is no excuse for having allowed the whole situation get so bad. Nobody listened when the doctors, nurses and other staff complained about the lack of hospital workers, and for some reason it seems that the only way to get people's attention is to ask for more money. And it looks like both sides have forgotten that the most successful strikes usually end in a compromise. (The nurses get a reasonable raise and nobody has to die.)

I visited my hometown last week and the local hospital which caters for a large numbers of nearby towns as well had already stopped taking in new cancer patients and women about to give birth.

There's a lot more I'd like to say but I already should be at the uni library so I'll just stop here.

[morningfine]

The way the nurses I've spoken to about this (mostly my mom and her friends) see the 20-something percent goal is that you have to ask way more than you're realistically expecting to get--in the past strikes they've always set their goal too low to have much room to negotiate. I don't think I've met anyone over thirty who actually believes they're going to get what they're asking. Of course, this was before the situation got as bad as it is now, and I think the mentality might have shifted so that now they think they stand a chance of getting it all.

...And I have to cut the comment short or be late from ride to work, awesome.