As an aside, I’ve seen this happen elsewhere as well. Classic play for wage theft. When I was working as a bartender in London to make ends meet, I had a coworker from Mexico on an expired visa. Great guy and the most hardworking. Well won’t you guess it, guy got picked up by immigration authority on payday.
A big part of what’s keeping my wages as a nurse depressed is health systems bringing in international nurses that are too afraid to demand better wages. They’re also often too afraid to pipe up about the sketchy shit too; I’ve gotten pushed out of jobs for being too insistent on doing things the safer or more legal way. And it’s never anything you could really prove in the go public way its more like I suspect the reason they’re telling me it takes longer to do this task when I’m here than when I’m not is that they skip the part where they explain all the patients rights to them or they skip the followup assessment to check for adverse reactions or whatever. It’s never “why are you bothering to do this critical step” it’s “why aren’t you as fast as this person?” or “why do you use so many of these supplies?” They’d never tell you to skip those parts in writing but they’ll sure as hell constantly keep asking why you’re so slow and wasteful compared to the people that are more scared of them.
And I’m not even blaming the international nurses, tbh they’re just as much victims in this as I and the patients am possibly even more in some ways. If you look into some of the stories of the nursing home contracts a bunch of those situations are actually just straight up human trafficking including being lied to about the job description, the pay, being lied to about their rights or what the actual regulations are on things and that they’ll get in trouble if they speak up even if it’s for the patients. Being told they’re not allowed to leave the building for multiple shifts worth of time or they’ll lose the job that brought them here. And then when you look at how many nurses already regardless of immigration status are already getting hit at work and think about what it must be like to be told you have to just deal with it or they’ll call ICE to come get you… it’s just fucking awful shit all around.
If nurse pay actually had to be adjusted to something more nurses born here were willing to do that work for the Healthcare industry as we know it would collapse (but tbh there’s a lot of other horribly inhumane things about it anyway so 🔥).
I appreciate your insight here. It has some relevance to where I am in the UK, where international workers are holding up the NHS. (This is one of many reasons why Brexit was a disaster)
If you run into this again, maybe you can use pursuit of efficiency to get proof?
“If we really want to find out why, we can use a Value-stream mapping approach to analyze the process. We might even identify additional specific opportunities where we’re able to speed up!”
By documenting all steps in a process and timing each one you’d be able to identify where the difference is, and whether a critical step is being skipped. It really doesn’t have to take much time or effort. If management can’t be bothered to make that happen, then they must not really care about efficiency.