Comparing councillors and nurses
IT’S a pity that nurses can’t make a case for comparing their wages and conditions with those of our city councillors.
For starters the pay for city councillors and the mayor come under the auspices of the Remuneration Authority, previously (and tellingly) called the Higher Salaries Commission.
Currently the authority has decided that councillors should be paid an amount which happens to be over what starting nurses are paid. Chair positions are paid in the vicinity of what senior nurses are paid.
The Remuneration Authority makes comparisons with those in central government, and is not required to take account of the budgetary implications of its decisions.
We can see what else they do not take into account by comparing councillors’ conditions with the conditions nurses work under.
Those on council do not have to turn up to work. If you put in your apologies for not being present at a council meeting the others on council can vote to accept your apologies. There is no requirement for a pesky HR person checking whether you have any sick days left, or whether you have a good and sufficient reason to not be at work.
This year for example the mayor has missed all three infrastructure services meetings, four other subcommittee meetings and a council meeting. The most absent councillor appears to be Cr Stedman, with two missed council meetings, and seven of 15 of the regular subcommittee meetings.
Perhaps it is just as well that on council only half of them need to be there to keep the system going. Nurses not only need a replacement staff member if a nurse is away, but if there is noone to fill a rostered position, another nurse is expected to work harder to cover for the missing staff member.
Those on council do not need anyone to cover for them when they are absent, and in fact if the entire meeting is cancelled noone is affected at all for the most part.
The hours of work would be considerably better too.
Council members have regular council and council subcommittee meetings which amount to about 10 hours per month of meeting time.
There are of course papers to be read and other meetings behind closed doors, but the accountable hours would be lucky to reach 25 per week for regular councillors. It would seem like heaven for a nurse to have contact time limited to maybe 10 hours per week, and the entire work commitment to be say 25 hours per week, very little of it weekend work.
And then there is the stress. If a busy nurse forgets to monitor a patient or gives them the wrong medicine, there can be dire consequences. However if council members, for example, vote for exorbitant rates increases, the decision may have expensive consequences for us. But noone will die. And in fact if none of them turn up for three months, staff on council will keep going and we may even possibly in fact have cheaper and better services.
Nurses on the other hand need not only other medical professionals to cover, but also patient’s relatives to help provide comfort and care even to go on strike for 24 hours.
Nurses need to become qualified, so may end up with a student debt of more than $20,000. Councillors have no such requirements. While they may have spent some money once every three years on an election, it is likely to be nothing like that amount.
In fact councillors can receive training paid for by
❛ Nurses have had to fight for their pay being even half of what backbench Members
of a Parliament have been awarded by the Remuneration Authority.
ratepayers which allows them to do extra work as hearings commissioners at $80 to $100 per hour. These hearings are often held in normal hours during councillors’ normal $1000perweek job. This means, for example, that any councillors who are also sitting on 2GP hearings could be paid their usual $1000plus per week and an extra $2000 if they sat for about six hours per day on four days of hearings. Councillors can use their ratepayerpaid training to be commissioners when they finish being on council, and receive a higher rate of pay per hour. As it happens Mayor Dave Cull will keep his extra $90,000 LGNZ job for a year or so after he finishes being mayor as well.
If patients are difficult, nurses are expected to be understanding and try to help.
On council if those who come to talk to a council meeting are critical, they can be publicly pilloried by the chair.
Nurses have had to fight for their pay being even half of what backbench Members of Parliament have been awarded by the Remuneration Authority.
And as for councillors and the mayor, it is perhaps understandable if they find it hard to treat spending money as seriously as they might if it were harder to come by.