Nurses who contracted with travel nurse agencies say their pay has been cut in half since the COVID-19 pandemic and the reduced salaries are making it difficult to make ends meet in the cities where they relocated.
“To go take a travel assignment is a really big deal, and to get there to have the rug pulled out from under you, for someone to collapse your pay, I just think it’s unconscionable,” Austin Moore, an attorney representing nurses in a class action lawsuit told NBC News on December 28.
“They’re on the hook for a lease, and they’re scrambling trying to find another job, and it’s a really terrible set of circumstances.”
Four travel nurse agencies are facing lawsuits over the lower salaries, according to the NBC report. Travel nurses were in high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic as recently as January 2022 with some earning as much as $5,000 a week in addition to monthly living stipends. By the spring of 2022, when the companies renewed the assignments, pay dropped to initial rates of about $44 an hour.
Supply and Demand
“No people, it’s called supply and demand,” wrote Devon Herrick in a blog posting on December 28, on the Goodman Institute Health Blog. “In retrospect, many of the nurses made the decision to relocate their families assuming the gravy train would never end.”
Herrick, a health care economist who has worked in hospital accounting departments, wrote staffing with temporary workers is a reality in the current market.
“Hospitals are loath to raise nurses’ pay and often would rather hire temporary nursing staffing at much high rates than raise the standard pay to retain nurses already on staff,” wrote Herrick. “Hospitals’ unwillingness to compensate nurses for the heightened risk (of treating infected COVID-19 patients) caused many nurses to jump ship and join traveling nurse agencies.”
Travel nurse company, Aya, told NBC news allegations by nurses of baiting and switching “are demonstrably false.”
Aya says travel nursing is a “lifestyle choice,” one generally not compatible with workers who want to plant roots in one location. The company points out that travel nurses represent 2.34 percent of the total employment market of 3,047,540 registered nurses.
-Staff reports