My wife sent me this asking for advice and I thought I should ask Reddit.
Email was about how nurses would extra $500 for working extra shift at the COVID unit basically after any nurse would have completed their 40 hours for that week and then picked up extra day to help out in COVID unit. And CNO wrote an email to the whole hospital.
“I ignored the email because I am in college and study after work/ weekends. I am a school nurse and I was hired through the hospital instead of the school district. School got canceled suddenly for 3 weeks (Jan 17 to Feb 4) after that email and I was told to come to the hospital to do COVID testing where I put in 48 hours each week. The manager told us they were short shafted and needed us to work there. I did not read the email thoroughly because I wasn’t planning on picking up extra shifts after getting done with my school nurse shifts. Within a few days my manager got COVID so I asked the other manager who works closely with my manager if there is compensation for working in the COVID testing sites to which I was told no but that she would talk to the CNO about it… she never got back to me or even spoke of it when I would see her. When my manager was back I asked if I can get a raise or if there is compensation for working the COVID testing sites for which I was told no and that we can put you wherever we want because of the clause at the end of each job distortion that says “ other duties as assigned”. He said I can try getting a raise but this hospital will tell you to go back and forth between HR, Manager, and CNO because they don’t want to give raises. Which is exactly what happened. I asked my manager the name of the person I would talk to in HR and when I talked to HR I told them I was there to talk about compensation and he was fine with it. Then in the middle of me talking the HR person asked if I talked to my manager for which I said yes and if I talked to the CNO for which I said no but I’ll talk to her too. And when I was taking to HR he told me that if I want to get payed more I can always apply to the ER or inpatient to which I said no. I talked to the CNO and she said based on the fact you have less then 2 years of experience I don’t think we can give you a raise but I will see what I can do based on the fast you have a BSN instead of an associates degree. My defense to getting a raise included having to jump from the school to the hospital and putting the school nurses where they were short staffed, driving from the school to the hospital during work hours, an inflation rate of 7% where a hospital 20 miles from them gave every employee a 6% raise because of inflation, and having to carry the responsibilities of a district nurse because they have not been successful at finding one. This is a good time to state that they had been looking for a school nurse (me) for the past 3 years.
When I talked to all these people none of them acknowledge the email that was sent regarding bonuses for picking up shifts in the COVID testing sites. So when the email was brought to my attention, me and the other school nurse went to the CNO and told her it’s not fair paying other nurses bonuses for picking up an extra shift in the COVID testing sites. The CNO’s response was “well you were reassigned from the school so you don’t get the bonus”. I then said it’s not fair and that we would like compensation. She then said “I heard you guys have been leaving at 4:30 (7am-4:30pm). I said even if we left early we still put in extra hours as the nurses who would get a $500 bonus and on top of that we were there for 3 weeks. She said she will get back but never did.
I don’t know what to think because when I first got hired I choose to be a school nurse because working M-F 7-3:30 (40 hrs) works with my study schedule. They had no plan of hiring other nurses and they took advantage of the fact that school was not in session to put us in a unit we’re other staff nurses were getting bonuses, then my boss texting us we will be working 7-7 M-F on Jan 30- Feb 4 because we’re short staffed and it’s only temporary and it’s for the community. Why can’t he ask his other staff to pick up an extra shift rather then asking us to work this many hours on top of already working 48 hours for 2 weeks. And on top of that if school wasn’t canceled, they probably would give a bonus to more nurses who picked up extra shifts to cover. I didn’t realized it would be like this being a school nurse though the hospital. School nurses though the district don’t hop between hospital and school when students aren’t in session. And this school has no health education classes which I was supposed to work on but how can I if I’m pulled in the the hospital whenever school is out of session?”