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$15,000 for the training she would receive if she didn't stay at the hospital for two years. "He made it seem like the problem is new grads, like we are not reliable." Day knew she was reliable and felt that signing the con- tract would show her new employers she was serious about the job, plus she was excited to get what she believed would be vital nurs- ing training. "He was really very kind and reassuring. He really sold me on this dream that I am being taken care of and my career will be set." Day said she left the office feeling excited to start her first job as a hospital staff nurse. "Obviously I knew it was going to be hard," she said. She knew the work would be challenging as she was serving a severely under- resourced and often marginalized population. "I figured it was the population that would be the hard part and not the hospital, but it turned out to be the reverse." Comsti said as market consolidation in the health care industry has grown, NNU has seen hospital employers leverage their monop- oly power to increasingly coerce nurses into debt through exploitative contracts. HCA, one of the largest health care corpora- tions in the country, widely uses TRAPs when employing newly graduated nurses. Kira Farrington is a single mother who grew up not far from the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. At five she landed in the emergency room with a stomach bug, and was delighted when a nurse snuck her up to the roof to see the life flight helicopter. "I never forgot how she made me feel as a person," said Farring- ton. "I was like: 'I am gonna be a nurse and I am going to do that for other people.'" With some childcare help from her mother and by working as a certified nursing assistant, Farrington enrolled in community col- lege for nursing school. "I was living in income-based housing, driving a beat-up car, I had WIC, food stamps," said Farrington. "Everything you can think of to get by." Farrington persevered, got her license in 2018, and took a job at HCA's Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., the only hospital in her area where she felt she could get experience treating high-acuity patients. "I was so excited to go to Mission," said Farrington, "but that excitement was short-lived." As a condition of employment, Farrington knew she would take part in HCA's StaRN program. But it wasn't until she was signing her paperwork that she learned she would have to pay HCA $10,000 if she left before working at the hospital for two years. "I was a little bit shocked and considered backing out," she said, "But I thought, where else am I going to get this great training?" What Farrington found was far from a meaningful training pro- gram. The first five weeks of the program was in a classroom and amounted to "a waste of time going over things we had already gone over in nursing school." Then for eight weeks she was precepted in the neurology unit. Later, when she did speak to union nurses, she found nurses who were transferred into ER from other units received 13 weeks of pre- cepting in ER. "I was irritated," she said, questioning how that was reasonable or fair to the new grads. Gaffney too said she was shocked by the so-called training she received in her Redding hospital and blown away by the hefty price tag the hospital claimed it cost. O C T O B E R | N O V E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 2 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 19 "I felt like I really didn't have a choice. I needed a job."