This is part one of a series of posts we will be making over the coming months, detailing some of the unsavory business practices in contract therapy that have tarnished its reputation.
Justice Brandeis once said that “sunshine is the best disinfectant.” Stambush Staffing doesn’t engage in any of the activity about which we’ll be writing, but we feel that it’s our responsibility to bring a little sunshine to the questionable happenings in this industry. We don’t control other agencies, but we hope that, with a little luck, some exposure of these practices will help lessen their stranglehold on the therapy professions and customers we serve.
Many (if not most) of us have been in a situation where we were paid less than some of our co-workers — others have had the opposite experience. Just about all of us have accepted this sort of arrangement as a fact of life, and sometimes it’s well-warranted. Having different levels of pay makes sense in an environment like a hospital, where more experienced healthcare professionals can be mentors and leaders within their respective departments. In fact, it’s hard to argue against a pay structure like that.
You might think that different pay grades would make sense in the world of contract therapy, too; after all, one can make the argument that someone with 20 years of experience is a better therapist than someone with only 1 year of experience and thus deserves more pay.
The reasoning seems plausible, but its impact on contract therapy and our professions is unequivocally bad, and it’s not too hard to see why.
Let’s say that a facility calls a staffing agency that engages in this practice, and that agency has two therapists available. One of these therapists is an inexperienced new graduate that gets the lowest hourly rate the agency pays, whereas the other therapist makes the most since he has 20 years of experience. In most cases, an agency will charge their customers the same rate regardless of which therapist gets the assignment. If the rate for inexperienced new therapist is $5 less per hour than the more experienced therapist, though, that adds up to $40 a day more that the agency makes.
That’s not too much cash at first, but the advantage of this tactic eventually shows up in an extra $2600 after a 13-week, full-time contract. When we’re talking about multiple 13-week assignments, an agency’s incentive to always send the less-experienced therapist to its customers only grows. If we assume that an agency engages in this sort of practice with 20 therapists, this will turn into around $208,000 per year. Over 10 years, this turns into $2,080,000 even if the rates in question never change.
That’s the trick. Unless they have a better reason not to, an agency will always have an unhealthy incentive to send the person with whom they will make more money when they pay their therapists based on experience.
For therapists, the consequences of this practice are obvious. If someone costs less for an agency to use for any given assignment, the trend will be that the person that makes the company the most money will, more likely than not, be used first, leaving the leftover assignments (if any) for those with the most experience.
For customers, the consequences are even worse; rather than focus on sending the best person for the job, agencies that pay their employees based on experience will always have a perverse incentive to send the therapist that makes them the most money. That may be good for the agency, but it’s often not good for the customer.
That’s why Stambush Staffing won’t pay its therapists based on experience. While it would be nice to reward our most experienced therapists with a higher pay grade, the impact of this practice is too detrimental to our professions and customers, not to mention the patients they serve.
What’s your take? Look for future entries of this multi-part series, and let us know what you think along the way!
