It's not only about the person cleaning the toilets, companies often have more than one employee that's paid too little.

Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.

>You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.

Based on the $49 charge for 5ml of sugar water to calm our newborn baby down so a nurse could draw his blood, probably not much.

(The nurse failed to draw his blood. After four or five failed attempts over several hours they eventually asked a nurse from the NICU to come over, who got it first try.)

The nurse is probably receiving very little of these $49. It's probably an inflated price charged by the hospital that is usually negotiated down to something reasonable by the health insurance provider. Similar to the discussion I had with my product manager recently: she can't expect that consultant to work according to the 100$ per hour that his company charges, because he is likely receiving a lot less.

> The nurse is probably receiving very little of these $49

Yes, that was the point. That the price of healthcare isn't based on the wages of the nurse.

But that's the point, no? If you double the consultant's salary, you won't have to pay double because most of it is just pure margin.

That assumes that the employer is willing to lose part of their margin and doesn't charge it back to their customers. Maybe not on the current contract, but future ones.

Nurses are highly skilled and highly paid workers, they do however have nursing aides for the grunt work.

In some places they may be highly paid. In many, they are not. I know this because of close family who have worked as managers of multiple hospitals and hospice that have extremely uneven pay scales even in a single region. You might even assert that the people with less pay have more/sufficient staffing on hand but you would be wrong. The amount of WTF/hospital in the US never ceases to surprise me.

That may be the case in the US, but not in Germany and Austria. Nurses are paid pretty bad, and, surprise surprise, they're having problems finding people to choose that career.

Yeah there's this huge demand, for which they blame blame the nurses "ungrateful snobs" or get upset that immigrants are hired "taking away our jobs" or...

I'm actually curious in what parts of world anyone would genuinely consider nurses to be "highly paid". The hourly rates for some types of nursing work can be quite decent, but still markedly less than what virtually anyone in IT with similar levels of experience would expect to receive. And it's often sufficiently physically draining that it's not feasible for most to work 40-50 hours a week.

Depends on the nurses qualifications and specialty.

Licensed vocational nurse don’t earn a huge amount.

Registered nurses (4 year degree+) make ok to good money.

Advanced practice nurses make good money overall. But they have post- graduate degrees and still don’t earn what a good senior developer does.