PA Requests Pay Cut to Help Others
The Register-Guard published a profile of Oregon PA Sylvia Gregory on Sunday. She has founded an organization in her hometown of Eugene to help the homeless, traveled to El Salvador more than a dozen times to help the poor, and rents a house for far below market value so that it is affordable for low-income renters.
Now, Gregory has requested a lower salary at PeaceHealth Medical Group, where she is employed, to help lower-wage workers.
All of which brings us back to that employee forum in January, the one in which Gregory learned that physician assistants like herself were being spared pay cuts. Her hand shot into the air.
“I’d be glad to take a 20 percent cut,” she said. Anything, in essence, to keep lower-wage workers from being laid off.
The room was silent. Gregory went on to say that she was serious, that she’d take a 40 percent cut if half went to the employees who make less than $15 an hour.
PeaceHealth had no such provision. But it now allows employees to voluntarily reduce their pay, thanks in part to Gregory, whose April 17 check will be — by her own choosing — $8 an hour lower.
“I am,” she says, “a privileged person.”
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