A “salary bumping game” involves skilled professions whose number within a community is limited. This, therefore, means that the supply of such labor is restricted. The game starts when a group of these employees in one organization come up together and start pressuring the organization to increase their pay (McConnell, 2012). These employees can be represented by an advocate or the head of the department. For example, an anesthesiologist can represent nurse anesthetics in their bid to pressure the organization to increase their pay. According to my view, salary bumping is a professional practice as it gives the employees the opportunity to be paid relatively equal amount within a given area. This will reduce instances of employee poaching.
The representative or the advocate asks pay rise citing other neighborhood organizations which they argue that pay more. They threaten the organization by expressing fear that those other organizations will lure the employees due to their high pay. Sometimes they even use the pay of the “moon-lighting” employees to express how other employees are paid better (McConnell, 2012). The truth is that moonlighters have to be paid more because they are casual employees who do not get other benefits such as pension, leave, and insurance. The representative will try to trade on the fear that if the organization does not increase the pay, they will lose their best employees. The truth is that there are organization that poach employees from other organization luring them with higher pay (Liebler, & McConnell, 2011). They recruit employees from other organization and they bump up their pay so as to maintain them. Even by doing so, the labor supply shortage problem will not be solved.
“Salary bumping game” can be organized by all the professionals within the community. For example, anesthetics may come together and start putting pressure on their employees for pay rise. This may be catastrophic in the sense that they will start exploiting oligopolistic power. As a result of high pay rise, medical expenses will increase to the public thereby making the poor not to access necessary medical services.
Phillips and Miller should be cautious not to jump into pay rise upon hearing the stories from Gable. The first thing they should do is to undertake intelligent investigation. They should then take the data they have gathered to the human resource department who will help in verifying or refuting the claims.
References
McConnell, C. R. (2012). The Health Care Manager's Human Resources Handbook. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Liebler, J. G., & McConnell, C. R. (2011). Management principles for health professionals. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
