50. Salaries & Wages at Joyce Green Hospital.

Key words/phrases: Pay Day, pay packets, pay slips, pay rises, ATMs, definition of a wage and a salary, Project 2000, nursing as an art or a science, John Shepherd-Barron - former director of the De la Rue finance company, Barclays Bank plc (Enfield branch), Seattle and Spokane, USA

No. 50

Understandably “Pay Days” have always been popular days with employees and they are undoubtedly likely to remain so. Do you have lots of memories of people talking about “pay day”, “pay packets”, “pay slips” and even “pay rises” at Joyce Green ?

Noticing that this week marks the 40th anniversary of the installation of the first ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) in England prompted me into thinking about salaries and wages at Joyce Green.

A wage, by the way, has been defined as “a fixed payment typically paid on a daily or weekly basis to someone who has completed a task requiring the use of physical skills or physical strength, whereas as a salary is defined as “the regular renumeration paid as wages + benefits for services rendered, to a professional person or a white collar worker”.

Thus, arising from these definitions a differentiation between ancillary staff and professional and technical staff seems undeniably obvious until one recalls that nurses and student nurses have traditionally used words and phrases such as: “pay”, “pay packet” and “wage slip” when talking about their renumeration !

This tendency to slip in and out of using the terms pay & wages versus the word salary seems to me to highlight an unresolved dilemma of the 50s - 60s (and later) about whether “nursing was a job or a profession”.

I shall certainly never forget overhearing a conversation between two nurses - not at Joyce Green I hasten to add - that went something like this:

“Where did you train ?” “Me ? I’ve never b-e-e-n trained. That’s what they do to circus animals ! But I was EDUCATED at the Blah-di-blah School of Nursing”.

How does that exchange strike you ? As pretentious perhaps ? Nevertheless what it did seem to me to do was to encapsulate the prevailing desire of some nurses to see their occupational preparation and work elevated into the world of fully fledged professionals.

This urgency to change from one social class group into another was probably - at least in part - behind the proactive efforts years later by some very senior nurses to encourage acceptance of the Project 2000 approach to nurse education.

Similarly the transfer of nurse education (and midwifery & health visiting education too) into Universities in the 1990s could also be viewed as a further strategy aimed at consolidating in this change of status ?

That consideration of the "proper" status of nurses, midwives and health visitors perhaps stemmed from earlier discussions about whether nursing is actually an art or a science and thus, whether nurses are purely and simply knowledgeable and skilled craftsmen (or craftspeople) or whether they are scientifically-directed professionals of a higher order ?

Maybe this dilemma has been resolved now ? Or perhaps such pertinent discussions are still continuing - unbeknown to me ? However one question that I do wonder about is this: When nurses discuss their end-of-the-month recompense do they still refer to their renumeration as their “pay” and equally do they still refer to “pay slips” or do they now use the terms “salary” and “salary advice slips”.

The reason that I ask this is because this may give some indication (albeit unintentionally) about how modern day nurses view their occupational status, i.e. as ‘semi-skilled or skilled ‘workers’ or as pucker professionals if indeed it's true that one social class tends to use one group of pay-related words whilst another groups uses a different set of salary-related words?

But let’s return now to the topic of ATMs because although the Scotsman John Shepherd-Barron, a former director of the De la Rue finance company claims to have developed the first on-line electronic ATM it seems that a Turkish man called Luther George Simjian designed the first ever non-automatic cash dispenser in 1939, which was installed in New York.

It was a stand-alone mechanical dispenser with no link to it's host business, the City Bank of New York but since customers didn’t appear to be very keen to use it it was removed after 6 months. Simjian incidentally had originally intended to study medicine at Yale but it seems that he finally went into medical photography, eventually becoming the Director of the University’s Medical School Photography Department.

Following this commercial failure there then followed a 28 year pause in the history of ATMs until the De La Rue company launched their first electronic ATM at the Enfield Barclays branch on 27 June 1967.

This second-ever model was electronic however because plastic cards bearing encoded details had yet to beinvented customers had to feed special non-returnable personal cheques into the machine in order to withdraw the maximum allowable amount - £10 at the time. In fact the first on-line ATMs (the TABS 550s) were installed in Seattle and Spokane USA in the 70s.

So what had this to do with staff at Joyce Green Hospital accessing funds that they had previously banked ? Well nothing really because as far as I can remember none of the ‘big five’ banks had any sort of presence at Joyce Green - at least not in the 60s - and therefore most employees continued to receive “wage packets” on a weekly or monthly basis for a good many years after the launch of the Enfield “hole in the wall” in 1967.

Perhaps though someone reading this might be able to tell us if an ATM was ever installed at Joyce Green Hospital ?