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Pensions:1 copy 7/22/09 9:50 PM Page 14 Rita Lambro, RN into living differently than her parents did. That means at 64, she's got $90,000 left on her mortgage and little in the way of savings. Her relationship to money, she said, is that she stretches it until "it breaks like a rubber band." "I used to work three jobs: nursing during the day, after hours at another hospital, and part-time home health on the weekend through an agency," she said. "As a result, I can afford to live in the nicest part of town and I have a new car. I own this house, and I've made lots of upgrades to it." After a childhood of relative poverty (what she calls "living on the fringes of the middle class"), her current comfortable lifestyle pleases her as much as her retirement years frighten her. When she was a kid, she'd walk into the butcher in suburban Detroit and stand behind a woman ordering a ham and, under her father's direction, ask the butcher for the ham bone left behind. "I used to tell people that we ate other people's scraps," she said. "My mother made less than nothing [working at a Detroit department store] and my dad worked in the tool-and-die game. When he couldn't do that, he'd be a carpenter. He'd do anything he could to make a living. He'd hock his guns after the winter season to have money. He'd work on guard duty. He didn't feel sorry for himself. He didn't smoke, seldom drank, and had no vices to help him cope. He always had a job." Cothran is similarly unsentimental about her job. She relishes her decent income, but says "I have no illusions about this job. I wasn't a kid when I took it. I was 37." 14 REGISTERED NURSE What she is is angry. If you watch CSPAN, you might hear Cothran call in as a viewer some days to argue in favor of universal healthcare. And she isn't shy about sharing what she doesn't like about her job: How sick everyone is by the time they are admitted to the hospital ("If we had universal healthcare, you wouldn't have that because everyone would know that you would be cared for."), how busy she always is ("Nursing isn't a lady with a lamp – you've got on a pair of tennis shoes, you're running, and your deodorant is running out."), and how her workplace needs a union ("If you see the amount of money we make, it's probably not any better than somebody who works at Ford or GM or is a schoolteacher. But they all have retirements and benefits because they have a union."). And mostly, she's angry that her bosses think high pay substitutes for pensions. "What they said is, 'You're supposed to save your own money,'" she said. "I probably could, if I chose to live in a two-bedroom apartment and drive a used car. But I don't want to live like some church mouse. That's what I lived like as a kid. I hear other people say they went to Europe and spent their money and now they're struggling. Well, we never did those things. We never had money. The most we ever had was one bike between my sister and me." It's not her priorities that are askew, she said. It's the hospital's. "I think they think that because they pay nurses so much, they don't have to provide us a retirement," she added. "But other companies pay employees a lot more than us and they provide retirement." W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G JUNE 2009