It’s Russia’s fault those nurses were asking for better working conditions

The Danish healthcare system has long struggled to recruit nurses. For years, nurses have demanded better pay, while the government has made bizarre excuses: it cannot simply raise their wages because, under the beautiful Danish Model™, wages are negotiated between employers and employees without government interference. This conveniently ignores that the government is the employer in those negotiations and that it has repeatedly intervened to end prolonged strikes by legislating employer-friendly settlements into law.

Then, in 2021, the Social Democratic government apparently felt it had to throw the nurses’ union a bone. It could not raise their wages, naturally. That would have been an attack on the Danish Model and possibly on white Judeo-Christian civilization itself. Instead, a commission made up of very well-credentialed people was appointed to find out what a fair salary for a nurse would be. Instead, it formed a commission tasked with determining what a “fair” salary for a nurse would be. The commission worked for several years until, on one bright and beautiful day in 2023, it announced that it had gone through the numbers, added and subtracted, and performed very serious economic science. Lo and behold: nurses were already paid completely fairly. If anything, they were slightly overpaid. The nurses, it turned out, had nothing to complain about.

Weirdly, this did not send young, hopeful students,now disabused of their irrational superstation, flocking to nursing schools. Maybe they haven’t read the report yet? The healthcare system still suffers from a nursing shortage. A former nurse I worked with a couple of years ago told me that during her ten years as an emergency room nurse, the number of nurses on a shift had been cut in half.