CNN reports fifteen thousand nurses walked off the job yesterday and the issue for them isn’t wages it’s quality of life.
“We are not on strike for our wages. We’re fighting for the ability to have some say over our profession and the work life balance,” said Mary Turner, a Covid ICU nurse and president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, the union waging the strike.
CNN.com
With some professions like executives, lawyers, information technology professionals being able to work remotely and essentially write their own ticket when working in high tech it isn’t surprising that more and more people will start demanding some level of work flexibility.
In another industry, rail workers are on the verge of going full strike on Friday. What do they want?
But the remaining two unions, who represent 57,000 workers slated to strike, are angry the recommendations don’t address a lack of sick days or attendance policies that penalize workers. Engineers and conductors face penalties for taking any time off, including weekends, outside of holidays and preplanned vacation, even in the case of emergencies.
WashingtonPost.com
It seems insane that nurses and rail workers don’t have some level of flexibility in their work but that seems to be the key issue and it’s not limited to those industries. There have been unionization pushes in places like Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, with ‘quality of life’ often cited as a key issue in addition to pay.
All of this is happening in a time frame when million of boomers start reaching for their workplace exits as they reach retirement age and enroll in social security and medicare. It seems obvious that workers will have the upper hand, recession or not, over the next decade.
If we’re right then those companies with deep pockets that can afford to attract, retain and optimize labor will be the most successful moving forward.
We’ll let you know which companies we find that might be able to do that but in the meantime, stay tuned and stay solvent.