avidiax
14 hours ago
People still work in literal coal mines, and their pay is still < $31/hour.
This discussion is about an effect at the margins. The marginal nurse that decides to quit, the low-seniority teacher that is paid less than their peers for the same work.
When the canary dies in a coal mine, everyone is in danger. But when working conditions worsen, only those employees at the margins (close to retirement, low seniority, worse than average assignment) will leave.
The question is whether there is some exponential effect on service from decreasing kitchen/nursing/teaching staff. Those fields all look like they have linear degradation of service to me.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/coal-miner/united-st...
jp57
13 hours ago
If everyone dies when the canary dies, then there wasn't much point in bringing it down there. The canary is at the margins, and thus it dies first when the gas comes. When it dies, everyone else should GTFO, because if the gas gets worse, they're next.
ajb
14 hours ago
Good analysis. Not sure I agree that they are all linear in degredation. Anything that serves a queue has superlinear degredation; as the service rate goes over the arrival rate. We've hit that tipping point in the UK and waiting times for access to medical treatment have ballooned; in our case aggravated by the exit of GPs.
Kitchen staff also serve a queue, but I don't think that will have the same effect as people always have the option of eating at home.
RangerScience
14 hours ago
I think the idea with the “canary in a coal mine” isn’t that it’s the margins that are at risk - it’s a signal that those margins have moved.
When working conditions worsen, and those at the previous margins leave, does that mean there’s now new people in the margins who were “safe” before?
dividefuel
14 hours ago
Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake. Mistakes are often, as far as I understand, held against the nurse, so you could lose your license. At a certain point, the risk becomes too great and you're better off quitting.
devilbunny
10 hours ago
Nursing boards are extremely capricious. I'm a doctor, I've heard it too often. Shitty nurses who shirk doing work but do everything required according to protocol are fine. Great nurses who make one tragic and understandable mistake to try to help a patient get their license pulled.
The US needs to adopt one particular British slang that hasn't made it across the pond: jobsworth. As in, that's more that my job's worth. Sitting there and doing nothing gets them left alone; trying to intervene without following a long and detailed protocol gets them screwed.
I protect the nurses that I work with (and they don't work for me, they work for the hospital, and I don't) as best I can if they are doing the right thing. I can't be there all the time. I need to be able to trust them, and they need to be able to trust me.
I was part of a bad patient interaction in the hospital a long, long time ago, when I was a resident. Nothing bad happened, ultimately. But I was harsh to a patient who was being verbally and physically abusive to the nurses. The patient complained a few days later. It was an emergency situation, and we will leave it at that (it didn't happen in the ER). And I was summoned to explain myself some days later. I said that I would not let that patient behave that way toward "my" nurses. And that was the end of it.
I don't think all of them liked me before or even after, but after that, they never bothered me about trivial things because they knew I would defend them and their actions done in good faith and without idiocy.
Medicine and the military are very similar in terms of command structure: doctors and officers issue orders, nurses and NCO's make them happen, and a doctor or officer who defends their nurses or NCO's for doing the right thing in the moment regardless of the rules will find their path much easier.
sofixa
13 hours ago
> Nursing seems like one where a feedback loop could happen. As others quit, your patient burden increases. The higher your patient burden, the more likely you are to make a mistake
Or your burden becomes insufferable and you burn out and quit.
vundercind
14 hours ago
Good high-seniority teachers can walk out of their job and straight into the white-collar office job world for more money and usually less bullshit. Probably even a remote role for extra improvement to QOL. It’s far from just new teachers leaving (that’s always been a thing).
pipes
14 hours ago
Two siblings who are teachers, and a parent who was a teacher. What sort of white collar work can they get? Only example I can think of is a teacher who left after two years and got a job as a Business analyst at my place of employment (they were in their 20s). I've honestly never seen any other teacher do this. Teachers are very underpaid in the UK, but they do have great job security and pension security. Not to mention amazing holidays. Neither of my siblings would give this up.
vundercind
10 hours ago
A lot of it’s about transferable skills, which good teachers tend to accumulate a lot of. For one thing, they have to have their shit together better than your average office worker, just to get by in their profession. They tend to have excellent organizational and planning skills, and are very good at packaging and presenting information. That’s a very-partial list, and doesn’t even cover topic-specific skills they may pick up. They’re often very good and quick at picking up things like project management, or any other communication- and organization-heavy role. Marketing. Lots of things they can get up to speed on really fast. It doesn’t hurt that in a lot of places (in the US) the pay’s so poor that they don’t exactly need to move directly into even a mid-tier office job to make more than they do with 10+ years teaching—a tad above entry-level can match or beat what they’re making, and it goes up fast from there (something they tend to find thrilling and surprising—hey, look, you get actual rewards and advancement in pay for doing great at your job, not just a a monochrome certificate someone ran off on the school laser printer!)