After living out a relatively "normal" year in 2020, Australians are now experiencing the true, harsh reality of COVID-19 — with New South Wales surpassing the two month mark of lockdown and states around the country struggling to contain the highly-infectious Delta variant.
Hospitals are bearing the brunt of the consequences, with hundreds of Aussies being admitted to wards around the state — and NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has predicted that "October is likely to be our worst month in terms of pressure on the system."
Early studies on Australian healthcare workers have revealed that staff are showing significant symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD in the face of the COVID-crisis — and so Aussies are calling for the government to quit labelling medical staff simply as "heroes" in lieu of addressing long-overdue pay rises.
In a Reddit thread, user u/CrashCourseHEMA asked Australians: "Don't call them heroes. When this is all over, should nurses get pay rises?"
The Australian public and medical frontline workers were quick to respond, with many calling out the toxicity of "hero culture" and supporting the need for better support and compensation in Aussie hospitals:
"As a nurse, I resent being called a hero — it implies that we don't have the same needs as 'mortals'. Nurses are paid fairly well with penalty rates and that is because we are professionals, with years of training and high intensity, complex roles. But our regular pay rates in no way mean we should not be appropriately compensated for the additional workload, complexity, responsibility and stress of our job in this pandemic."
"If we call them heroes, then we don’t have to pay them more. Heroes do it out of altruism, right? I mean, do Superman or Spiderman think about salary sacrificing into super?"
"I'm expecting in September, when the hospitals are in mega meltdown, [Gladys Berejiklian] is going to pull a Boris Johnson and ask everyone to clap for hospital staff at the end of their driveway. In NSW, ambo's last "pay rise" was 0.3% — it's a disgrace. A cut when you factor in inflation. But that's how conservative governments operate."
"The 'hero' narrative deliberately avoids all responsibility to pay nurses better. What characterises a hero? It’s someone who selflessly and tirelessly works to help others, no matter the cost to themselves. 'Hero' and 'compensated fairly for the work they do' are mutually exclusive. You rely on Superman, but you don’t put him on the payroll. That would be wrong."
"I'd be willing to settle for an appropriately-staffed ward, to be honest."
"Want to retain good staff? Stop treating people like shit. Good conditions and work/life balance is valued by most above pay."
—u/RedLeader7
"We should be staffing so that we can comfortably manage emergencies when they arise — but that would mean maybe 75% of the time we would be having an easy shift. They don’t want to pay us to do that, so we get stretched thin. Honestly I’d take a pay cut to make this a reality."
"I'm a registered nurse in intensive care — pay is decent in the public system, but the workload is often unacceptable. No amount of money is worth coming into work and being slammed and constantly feeling that you can’t meet the high expectations that are set."
"The difficulty is that when you have stable, straightforward patients, you only just have enough time to do everything you need to do — but when the shit hits the fan, you end up drowning and providing substandard care. And shit hits the fan fairly regularly."
—u/metcall
"The pay isn't terrible, but I've worked in many 24 hour industries and the rostering for nurses is the most ass-backwards that I've ever seen. You are pretty much signing up for life-long exhaustion because they can't figure out how to properly roster in a way that doesn't completely destroy circadian rhythm or make a regular poop schedule impossible. Get it together! Nobody should live like that."
"The pay isn't good — ICU central supply nurse here. It is not terrible, but you find me a profession that earns just over $100K with 50% nights (that are often busier than a day shift). I've studied for five years at uni, plus a lot of formal and informal education. I also have very few prospects of earning more money, I've pretty much hit the ceiling with how much I can earn."
—u/ninja_cactus
"I'm a doctor, so don't know the nursing situation intimately, but personally I do think the people who really need a pay rise are aged care workers. They do an absolutely backbreaking job for very minimal pay, they're terribly understaffed and often undertrained (especially when it comes to patients with issues like dementia), so the turnover is massive — and it's bad for both them and the people they care for."
"As a nurse, I hate this whole hero/serving the community rhetoric. Most nurses don't actually serve the community, when 95% of nurses get paid to provide a service. Popular to contrast belief, we get paid reasonably well for what we do. I would personally give up a pay rise for a couple of years to see nurse-to-patient ratio's mandated nationwide — along with more accountability and scrutiny of healthcare leaders' decisions with how they affect patient safety."
"The problem at the moment in healthcare — and I feel this is a reflection on society — is the desire for healthcare to be aesthetically pleasing, rather than be of actual substance. There is also a lack of holding people accountable for their own problems caused by their own decisions."
And finally: "I think all the people who keep society functioning and didn't have any choice but to go into work, while a whole bunch of us privileged assholes were able to just work from home, should receive pay rises, to be honest."
—u/yeryerdude
Shout out to frontline healthcare workers all around Australia — you're doing exceptional work and you deserve to be compensated for it.
