BEND, Ore. (AP) - A report from the Oregon Employment Department finds average hospital pay rose faster than the median but that doesn’t mean every hospital worker is making more.
The report detailed in The Bulletin on Friday found wage gains were mostly among the highest-paid workers between 2011 and 2016 and the disparity was most extreme at Oregon’s 60 general surgical hospitals.
The report’s author, Central Oregon regional economist Damon Runberg, said he was asked to write about trends in health care and so began looking at payroll records.
Runberg suspects the disparity stems from a labor shortage, especially in high-skill positions. The same trend can be seen in industries like construction, where wages for electricians are growing faster than for general laborers, he said.
Statewide, there are 10,000 health care job vacancies in the state, and 72 percent of them are identified as “difficult to fill,” the report noted.
“The health care industry is growing more complex and some jobs now demand more experience, education or certifications,” Rebecca Berry, vice president of human resources at St. Charles Bend, said. “Hospitals are competing for the same pool of applicants, which will certainly have an impact on wages.”
Runberg also used occupational survey data to compare wage increases among managers, practitioners such as doctors and nurses, and support staff. In that comparison, managers saw the fastest wage gains.
Meg Niemi, president of Service Employees International Union Local 49, which doesn’t have a presence in Central Oregon but represents about 40 percent of hospital support staff in the state, doubts that managers are any harder to find than specialized nurses or surgeons.
“These folks have the ability to pay themselves more,” Niemi said of managers. “You would think the average wages for front-line workers and caregivers would’ve gone up more.”
Hospitals are seeing high turnover in entry-level jobs, and that could be holding wages down, said Barbara Amato, director of talent management at Salem Health.
“I would question the assumption that management pay is growing at the expense of entry-level workers,” she wrote via email. “As new employees enter, they start from a lower wage level than if the incumbents have remained and grown in those roles.”
The report, “Growing Wage Disparity within Oregon’s Hospitals,” doesn’t reflect spending cuts that hospitals like St. Charles Bend have made in the face of declining commercial insurance coverage. As premiums become more unaffordable, people shift to high-deductible plans and use fewer health services, according to St. Charles executives.
The majority of hospital workers made less than $20 an hour in 2016, according to Runberg. Those wage-earners accounted for a larger share of the workforce, 55.6 percent, than they did in 2011, he found. Meanwhile, there’s been no change in the portion of people making $50 an hour or more.
“It’s those high-wage earners pulling that number up,” Runberg said.
Looking at a different set of data, the Occupational Employment Statistics Survey, from 2013 to 2016, Runberg found that management occupations saw median wages rise 9.8 percent; practitioners and technicians saw median wages rise 8.9 percent; and support occupations saw the median rise 7.4 percent.
Those figures can’t be adjusted for inflation because they’re estimated from survey data.
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Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com
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