A nurse reflects on how public support evaporated during COVID. In British Columbia, one nurse files an injury claim every 16 hours from workplace violence, and 60,000 nurses are on strike with a 98% vote in favor. The speaker asks: remember the balcony applause? Now offer tired nurses actual thanks.
Chapters
They say you can judge the character of someone by how they treat people in service jobs. If they're prone to yelling at a barista or being rude to a server, there's a good chance that that person is an asshole. During COVID we ran a real-time experiment on that theory, except the service workers were nurses and the stakes were somebody's life. I remember watching clips of people screaming at nurses in emergency room hallways, spitting at them, threatening them for asking someone to put on a mask. These were the same people who 18 months prior banged pots and pans light up lanterns on their balconies every night at 7 to say thank you. The nurses union in B.C. says one nurse every 16 hours goes off work on an injury claim due to violence. And that trend is getting worse. Right now there are about 60,000 nurses in British Columbia on the picket line. And if you've ever thought, man, the nurses are always on strike, you're wrong. This is the first province-wide B.C. nurses union strike since 1989. They voted more than 98% for that job action. You don't get that kind of unity from people who just want more money. You get it from people who are exhausted, understaffed, getting hurt on the job. It isn't just here. Boston this week, more than 4,000 nurses walked out for a day, then got locked out by their own hospital for 5 days. Different country, different rules, same story. Burnout. Understaffing. And a workforce that has just run out of patience for being treated as disposable. Nursing is one of the only jobs where the person doing it is trying every single hour to keep you alive. And still too many people find ways to scream at them or blame them for policies that they didn't write. We like to think we're a civilized society here in Canada. And we are, in most cases. We take guns away from people who get violent criminal convictions. Nobody goes bankrupt because they can't pay medical debt. We don't really have medical debt. We penalize drug companies who gouge on pricing. But we're not perfect. Look, strikes end. Contracts get signed. The picket lines will eventually come down. But the way we treat people who show up when we're at our worst, scared, Sick. Dying. That doesn't get fixed by a new collective agreement. That gets fixed by us. Next time you're in a hospital hallway and a nurse looks tired, say thank you. Mean it. They heard the pots and pans. What they need now is for us to remember why we are banging them in the first place.
