Nurses in the UK are relatively poorly paid: https://nursingnotes.co.uk/agenda-for-change-pay-scales-2019.... They start at Band 5, which is about 24,000 pounds annually. That’s about $30,000 per year for a job that requires a three-year university education. (Somewhere between an ADN and BSN in the US.) London gets a 20% or so bump, so let’s say $36,000. A VA nurse in NYC starts at more than double that, over $78,000: https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2019/LPS/NY.xls.
That said, it's true that nursing is relatively under-paid in the UK. Part of that however is because the state is the largest employer of nurses which keeps wages down but that in turn keeps the cost of healthcare down.
When your state only provides a minority of nursing then it has to pay higher wages to compete with the profit-driven sector.
But it's crude to say "Nurses make less than half than in the US", because so do software developers, but no-one's saying "think of the devs!".
Why is it too crude to compare those salaries? The gulf between 30k and 78k is enormous. The UK nurse certainly isn't making up all, or even most, of that difference in government benefits.
Every salary in the US should be prefaced with "this sounds really high, but to compensate if anything goes wrong you will literally live in the streets forever". Thus, comparing a US salary to another country's salary should be taken with a mountain of salt: In most other countries where you'd want to live the height of the salary is modulated by the necessity of providing the less fortunate a liveable existence, including potentially you.
This is one of the special-est pleadings I've ever seen on HN. You might has well have said the privilege of living in the shadow of Big Ben compensates UK nurses. We are comparing financial transactions.
Yeah, I guess I should have said "post-tax and post-insurance/wellfare parity". Though you're right, the US salary would have lower taxes and the difference would look larger. I suppose the GP was weighting tail events quite heavily. Comparing the distribution of financial outcomes accross countries, given a certain salary would be very interesting.
The point is that salaries are not directly comparable as geography varies because cost of living is radically different, nurse or not.
I am fairly sure that if I moved to SF I would make 70%-100% more than I do in London, doing essentially the same job. In Poland if I had to guess I'd say a drop of at least half.
What is relevant is whether or not the salary is reasonable within the location.
It doesn't make sense to compare US wages with UK wages without considering all other factors.
It's more meaningful to compare UK nurse wages to other UK wages. That still shows that nurses are under paid but in a more meaningful way.
Of course the gulf between 30k and 78k is enormous but not many people in the UK are earning 78k, so it's really not meaningful to suggest that's what nurses ought to be earning, that would be in a small minority of earners.
Why can't we compare wages between the two places? I get that there are CoL adjustments you have to make, and that there are government benefits UK citizens get that US people don't. But those aren't unknowable and they probably don't add up to a 100% difference, which the difference here exceeds.
We can compare total compensation (where total includes also benefits/detriments of living in a specific location) fairly. We can't compare wages fairly. That was likely the point. The only numbers thrown around in the original post were wages, not compensation.
NHS benefits aren’t even very good. If you’re a nurse in the US, you likely get employer covered health insurance. In the US, that’s additional compensation. In the UK, that’s coming out of your income through your National Insurance contribution. NHS pension is 1/54 of average salary per year of service. If you average $50,000, you’re looking at $32,000 per year. Ona nurse’s salary you’d get at least $20,000 per year from Social Security. To make up the difference the nurse has to put just $200/month into their 401k.
Certainly the compensation of nurses in the US is higher if measured in monetary terms.
The UK has an entirely different attitude to pensions than the US, and you could write a book about it, so it is hard to make a direct comparison because the expectations are so far apart.
The NHS seems to be capable of attracting nurses from overseas, in my local hospital you could speak Tagalog and get the same experience. The problem recruiting nurses into the NHS is the punitive visa regime, not monetary compensation.
Employer health insurance rarely covers everything, and with how inflated medical costs are in the US you easily end up paying lots of money out of pocket.
The other part of it is that it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get a nursing license or degree in the UK, at least not as bad as the US.
Isn't London one of the other most expensive cities in the world? Anyway, both scales have a locality bump. If you're in Baltimore, the VA scale goes down to $60,000 starting. But outside London, the NHS scale starts at $30,000.
You can become a degree registered nurse in the U.K. in four years via an apprenticeship without paying anything for it out of pocket[1]. Obviously the sensible thing to do is move to the US immediately after qualifying but good luck getting paid and trained at the same time in the US.
There are thousands of Portuguese nurses who emigrated to the UK, since that 'low' salary is still much higher than what they would be paid here. Now Portugal has a shortage of nurses too.
I believe the immigration wave started after austerity measures were implemented in both countries.
