The nursing units of the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. are discussing among themselves the best way to implement a proposed pay adjustment that may be enforced starting next month.<\/p>\n
According to CHCC director of nursing Leslie Camacho, they don\u2019t have the actual rates yet but the adjustment may be in the form of converting nurses into salaried personnel instead of per-hour employees. That means a fixed monthly rate that is exempt from overtime.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this increase, according to the CEO, they will be exempt from the [Fair Labor Standards Act]. They will no longer be making overtime,\u201d Camacho told Saipan Tribune last week. \u201cThe proposal is they\u2019re going to be salaried so it will be the set amount.\u201d<\/p>\n
Camacho said she was scheduled to meet last Friday with the nursing units to consolidate their ideas and then present them to chief executive officer Esther Mu\u00f1a.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have the actual rates. What we\u2019re doing right now\u2014and I\u2019m meeting with head nurses and supervisors\u2014is go back to their units and discuss this proposal for an increase in salary of their staff nurses and come up with, amongst their units, what they feel is appropriate,\u201d Camacho said.<\/p>\n
She said the nurses right now are clocking in and are paid from $11 and above per hour, depending on their unit.<\/p>\n
She added that the salary should be able to compensate the nurses for extra hours that they might be needed for work.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy question to the CEO during that meeting was, will this salary increase be able to compensate them for that extra time that they\u2019re staying late?\u201d Camacho said.<\/p>\n
She said the pay adjustment would be a big help to the nurses and that a lot of them are looking forward to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it would help a lot. I\u2019m hoping that it will compensate for that extra time that they do stay late. There are days when there is no choice\u2014nurses are out sick, other nurses have to work extra hours,\u201d Camacho said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe staff nurses definitely will feel the increase, especially since they lost their housing, I think it was last year. So I think having this increase will hopefully compensate for that loss,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The nursing units of the Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. are discussing among themselves the best way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[402,666,2364,8322],"class_list":["post-215048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-ceo","tag-chcc","tag-esther-mu","tag-leslie-camacho"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}