Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 401 Social Sciences Building, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0533, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2012 Dec;75(12):2183-90. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.08.015. Epub 2012 Aug 27.
The long-term care industry in the United States faces serious recruitment and retention problems among nurse aides. At the same time, these low-wage workers may feel trapped in poorly-paid jobs from which they would do well to leave. Despite this tension, not enough is known about how workers fare when they leave (or stay in) such care work. Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation for the years 1996-2003, we examine the relationship between different job and occupational mobility patterns and wage outcomes for nurse aides, focusing on which job transitions offer better opportunities to earn higher wages and on whether job transition patterns differ by race. Our results confirm high turnover among nurse aides, with 73 percent of the sample working in occupations other than nurse aide at some point during the survey time frame. About half of respondents that transition out of nurse aide work move into higher-paying occupations, although the percentage of transitions to higher paying occupations drops to 35 percent when nurse aides that become RNs are excluded. Among black workers especially, wage penalties for moving into other jobs in the low-wage labor market appear to be rather small, likely a factor in high turnover among nurse aides. The findings illustrate the importance of occupation-specific mobility trajectories and their outcomes for different groups of workers, and for understanding the constrained decisions these workers make.
美国的长期护理行业在护士助理人员的招聘和留用方面面临严重问题。与此同时，这些低薪工人可能感到被困在低薪工作中，他们很想离开这些工作。尽管存在这种紧张关系，但对于工人在离开（或留在）此类护理工作时的情况，人们了解得还不够多。本研究使用了 1996 年至 2003 年《收入和计划参与调查》的纵向数据，考察了不同工作和职业流动模式与护士助理人员薪酬结果之间的关系，重点关注哪些工作转换能提供更高薪酬的机会，以及工作转换模式是否因种族而异。研究结果证实了护士助理人员的高离职率，在调查期间，73%的样本在某个时候从事过护士助理以外的职业。大约一半的受访者在离开护士助理工作后转入薪酬更高的职业，尽管当排除成为注册护士的护士助理后，转入薪酬更高职业的比例下降到 35%。尤其是在黑人劳动者中，转入低薪劳动力市场其他工作的工资惩罚似乎很小，这可能是护士助理离职率高的一个因素。研究结果说明了特定职业的流动轨迹及其对不同工人群体的结果的重要性，以及理解这些工人做出的受限决策的重要性。
