Contracting Out Hospital Support Jobs: The Effects of Poverty Wages, Excessive Workload,
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on in-depth interviews with 70 hospital support workers in Vancouver, Canada, this article describes how the contracting out of their jobs to multinational corporations has had deleterious consequences for these workers, their families, and the health care system. Privatization and outsourcing resulted in a steep initial wage reduction for hospital support staff, decreasing by up to 50 % from approximately $18 to $20 per hour to between $9 and $12 per hour—with much weaker job benefits. Despite recent wage increases as a result of Hospital Employees ’ Union–led contract negotiations, workers still earn lower hourly wages than they did before contracting out and report challenges making ends meet. The concluding discussion presents the implications of these findings for the sociology of work and health and proposes some policy reforms for mitigating the negative consequences of privatization. The article also describes the beginning of a living-wage movement in Vancouver that has emerged in part as a result of this decision to outsource these hospital support jobs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".