Quote Originally Posted by Todd4State View Post
That may be true but as an employee if you're paying someone 300K and you're paying me 100K then that gives me the perception that I'm worth 300K and that you're willing to and have the ability to pay it.
No doubt it's a huge morale issue. And some of it is based in reality. Again, if you're not seasonal and you are regularly using travel nurses, that means you are basically using travel nurses for price discrimination to fill out that last 5% or whatever of your nursing staff that you can't fill with your regular wages. The "market clearing price" or whatever you want to call it would be 15% higher, but you can use the fact that most nurses don't want to work on short term contracts and have to live in temporary housing and relocate every so many months to keep everybody from trying to do it.

But some of it is not based in reality. Pre-Covid when the differentials weren't as crazy, a big chunk of the differential would be explained by the fact that the hospital wasn't paying the employer side of FICA, unemployment, etc. and also didn't have to provide benefits. What was left was still a nice differential, but when you look at paying exhorbitant short term rent prices or living in a travel trailer and either way, not living in a place that is as nice as a home and away from family, the differential wasn't such a sweet deal.