Why Improving Low-Wage Health Care Jobs Is Critical for Health Equity

Abstract

Health care workers earning low wages in the United States are positioned squarely at the intersection of class, race, gender, and migration fault lines. Commitment to health equity demands higher pay, improved benefits, and more workplace protections for these workers. Clinicians with higher status jobs must help dismantle stratifications created by racist, sexist, and classist histories of exclusion. Health equity is impossible without systemic and organizational responses to the needs of members of the health care workforce with low wages.