National Nurses United

D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 4 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 7 We continue our explorations of the life and career of Kay McVay, a longtime intensive care unit RN at Kaiser Permanente and pres- ident emeritus of the California Nurses Asso- ciation. In this installment, McVay discusses registered nurses' historically low wages and how that trend was turned around through unionization. Some people are actually becoming regis- tered nurses now because it's a profession seen as making decent money. What do you think of that? Well, first of all, I didn't go into nursing for the money; it was about caring for people. But you still have to support yourself and your family. I get very upset because nobody is really fully aware of the history of how long it's taken for nurses to begin to make a decent wage, to be able to be self sufficient. Back when I was nursing and we RNs really weren't organized, the orderly, the janitor, the hospital gardener—all of those hospital support jobs—always made more money than the RNs because they were men and had families to support. Heck, when RoseAnn [the NNU executive director] first started working with us nurses, she didn't think it was right that supermar- ket checkers were making more than we were. And that's because they were unionized. Do you think this idea of nursing as a selfless call- ing actually hindered RNs in their pursuit of a fair, living wage? Probably, yes. You know, at the time, I didn't question it. I just wanted to be a nurse. Everybody got paid more than the nurse. It took a while for nurs- es and women overall, actually to realize that the two weren't mutual- ly exclusive. We deserved fair and equal pay for the type of work we were doing, especially considering the intelligence and education required. Why do you think nurses made so little? It's likely a combination of things. First, we were women, and our income was seen as supplemental only. So, sexism. Second, when nursing was instituted in hospitals after World War II, our pay was always "put in the cost of the room." We were never a separate item, we were part of the room fees. So that gives you a little history about why it's been so difficult for RNs to gain respect and a living wage. And third, a critical mass of us until recent history weren't unionized and fighting for better standards. So tell us how much you used to make. I remember when I was still in nursing school at Orange County General, we were given a $5 a month stipend. That kept me in shoe polish, shoe laces, and occasional Cokes at the local drive-in diner. I was working down in Southern California, and I remember that when we moved up to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965, that my paycheck went from like $315 a month to a grand total of $415 a month, which was a $100 increase—because Kaiser Oakland was unionized! I was over the moon. But when my first husband left and we got a divorce and I had two children to support, I was barely making it. Nurses didn't break the double-digit hourly wage until after 1975! Up until then, I had only been getting like $8 or $9 an hour. The plumbers were making $15 an hour. And when I left bedside nursing in 1995, I was making a fabulous amount of money in my opinion. I was making $28 plus change an hour. That was unheard of. But what was the legacy of all the years you'd worked at such low wages? You know, at the time I left, I had a grand total of $38,000 in my IRA [retirement account]. You just didn't make the wage you needed to put money in there. And then because I made so little money between '57 to '95, I got all of $600 a month from Social Security. This is why we Kaiser nurses fought so hard for the defined-benefit pension for nurses. It's a very recent thing and we didn't win that for our contract until 2001. But when you look at the other public health and safety professions—historically male-domi- nated professions such as police officers, fire- fighters, etc.—you see that they were paid very well and, on top of that, money had been put aside for their defined benefit, a pension. So what do you want nurses today to take away from your experiences? Absolutely, your heart must be in nursing. But we fought, through our unions, tooth and nail for every salary increase, every economic benefit that you enjoy today. You deserve every penny you make, and don't let them take anything away from you. "Conversations with Kay" appears in each issue of National Nurse. Through McVay's stories, we docu- ment the origins of the modern staff RN movement as well as the changing practice and culture of nurs- ing and healthcare. The first installment appeared in the January-February 2014 issue. Conversations with Kay

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