Helio Beltrão: Nursing floor will cause unemployment and worsen service

The law establishing a national salary floor for nurses (R$4,750), nursing technicians (R$3,325) and nursing assistants and midwives (R$2,375) was enacted.

Lawmakers are fully convinced that the minimum wage is beneficial to current and future healthcare professionals and have even amended the Constitution to provide additional legal certainty. No gaps for the Supreme’s hermeneutic juggling.

It turns out that the floor is yet another populist measure with harmful consequences: it will harm both health workers and users of health services and the SUS.

In general, policies to “appreciate” professionals by decree, regardless of the profession, have the effusive support of well-meaning people. After all, who will disagree with valuing a particular profession? However, unfortunately, such policies harm precisely the least qualified, the youngest and the poorest regions of our vast country. And they benefit the richest regions and the large hospital networks, which practice higher average salaries for better qualified professionals.

In any Microeconomics 1 course there are diagrams that show that wage floors cause a drop in the employment level of less qualified workers, precisely those that the floor is intended to benefit. In addition to the fall in employment, the number of workers looking for such jobs with artificially high wages (the unemployment rate) tends to skyrocket (due to the elasticity of the supply curve).

There will be more workers looking for more scarce jobs. Consequently, employers are prioritizing experienced and highly productive employees, cutting non-mandatory benefits and increasing the number of caregivers (who have no floor by law). The quality of customer service tends to get worse. The vacancies that survive will be filled by professionals who have had more opportunities to study and more experience, displacing the simplest.

More severely affected will be philanthropic health organizations such as Santas Casas, particularly in poorer regions. Therefore, the offer of health to the poorest outside the SUS will worsen. Additionally, municipal and state health expenditures will be more committed to payroll, potentially harming medicines and other essential items. In many states, such as Pernambuco, Acre and Paraíba, there was an immediate increase of more than 100% in the remuneration of nurses (the night shift and unhealthy work premiums increase proportionally) and even more for technicians.

Armed with Marxist exploitation theory as a mantra, many pseudo-analysts imagined that there would be no immediate layoffs. However, just yesterday, Lar São Vicente de Paula in Novo Hamburgo (RS), which serves 43 elderly people with an average age of 85, announced the dismissal of all 13 professionals and the closure of the nursing sector. At this first moment, the home called on volunteers to act as caregivers. How are the elderly? Our legislators didn’t think about it. It went bad, and over time things tend to get worse.

In fact, the left, the bolsonaristas and the center walked hand in hand in this hunt for the votes of health professionals and families. Only twelve courageous deputies –the integral bench of the New Party and four more solitary deputies– defended the real interest of the less qualified working class by voting against the floor.

As long as the belief persists that wages can be determined by government through considerations of ‘fairness’ rather than productivity, supply and demand, and the competitive process, we are doomed to pave the way to hell with the lives of professionals who will fail to earn the job they deserve.