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Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas[1] will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month...
The wage increase will cost the hospital about $350,000 a year. The expense will be covered with money from the upcoming quarter's bonus pool for the hospital's 60 vice presidents and top executives.
After this, every worker employed by Dallas County will make at least $10.25 an hour (still not a living wage by many measures).
Note also that this will barely put a dent in that pool, expected to be at least $3M for the year.
[1] People who have memories of November 22, 1963 will remember that as a historic location
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Hospital Uses Executive Bonus Money to Give its Workers A Raise
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When I met th'POPE back in '58, I scrubbed him with a MILD SOAP or
DETERGENT for 15 minutes. He seemed to enjoy it ...
(Score: 2, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 17 2014, @08:41AM
What is this? Class warfare? Paying the people that actually take care of people enough to take care of themselves may be all fine and dandy, but to take it for those least willing to give! Do you not know that vice-whatevers have children to feed, mistresses to support, and bookies to pay off? It is not fair to take from those who have taken real risks, by having children, mistresses, or bookies, to give to those who just work for a living by helping people without any thought of the down side, like, that by helping people, you know, people might get helped! Oh, the horror! Oh the humanity! I tell you, it is class warfare, and the 60 vice-whatevers probably outnumber those who actually change bed-pans, so you know who I am going to side with! Until the revolution. Then I never knew them. But I can provide testimony about what jerks they were, when it came to paying to help people.
(Score: 2) by hoochiecoochieman on Tuesday June 17 2014, @09:55AM
I wonder what the hospital needs 60 VPs for. Is it for changing diapers and emptying bedpans? What else can 60 VPs do?
I wonder what the qualifications of these VPs are. Do they know anything about healthcare at all? Probably less than those workers who make minimum wage like they're some kind of useless drones.
The whole fucking world is turning upside down.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:13AM
If it's anything like the stories some people tell about the NHS, they're mostly former ward doctors who are too old and/or incompetent to let them near patients, but are too difficult to sack.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by hoochiecoochieman on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:34AM
I didn't RTFA, but this is not in Europe, it's in the US, and even more, it's in Texas.
This hospital is most likely a private corporation, so the comparison to NHS doesn't apply.
I live in a country with public healthcare and never heard of something as insane as this. I've read a few crazy stories about private hospitals, but nothing with these proportions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @01:49PM
In the 90s our congress made it so everyone had to get insurance thru their work. This covered about 70-80% of the population. This created a huge influx of money into the system.
We went from hospitals being run by a few hundred people to a few thousand. The cost ratio was not in peoples minds anymore after a few years. I can get 'free health care for 50 bucks' (neither free but cheap to me but not my insurance company). With the decoupling of cost to service people no longer really cared about what the real cost was. The hospitals incorporated from community things that were supported usually by donations and taxes and fees; went to corporate for profit organizations. There have been huge massive mergers. For example where I grew up there were about 7 hospitals that provided different levels of care. Now there is 1 very large organization that runs them all and the cities around it. The hospital where I was born went from a building with maybe 100 rooms to a sprawling complex of I think the last number I heard was 2300 where they charge 1500+ just to be in a room for 1 night.
The decoupling of cost vs service has made it very easy for these sprawling organizations to manipulate people into paying outrageous costs. You can in some cases pay 80 dollars for what is a disposable cotton swab. Something you could buy a lifetime supply for with 80 bucks. It is was when the insurance companies could no longer swing their investments (they saw the writing on the wall a year before the rest of us). It is why they pushed thru the ACA. They needed ever larger bases of people paying in to cover the ever growing costs. Their investments imploded and they went from a 95% payout rate to a 110%. As insurance companies are not a ponzi scheme but more like an investment bank with a large payout rate.
We thought costs were high a couple of years ago? Just wait and see. On average an American pays 10x for the same out of care as people get in the rest of the world. Those VPs and junkets out to the cayman islands dont pay for themselves...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:18AM
I'll be fun to watch when it finally tips over.
(Score: 1) by unauthorized on Tuesday June 17 2014, @10:35AM
I was going to post the same thing, but then I noticed the hospital must be employing nearly 3000 workers if it costs it 3.5e5/year to increase wages by 10.25. I can potentially see them needing that many execs. Not that I'm saying your suspicions are wrong, you are probably right on the money about most of them being useless.
(Score: 2) by monster on Wednesday June 18 2014, @08:15AM
It's not an increase by $10.25, it's an increase to $10.25. As told in TFA, their previous minimum salary was $8.78/hour, so an increment by $1.47.
We are not told how many hours per month their workers do, but if we assume about 340 workdays it would give around 700 work-hours per day, or nearly 90 people with a 8 hour workday. Compared to that number, 60 vice presidents and top executives is a lot!
Of course, we don't know what percentage of their workers do more than the minimum and are not affected by the raise, which would indeed change the perception about their relative numbers.