answer:Welcome to Fluther. It doesn’t sound illegal. If nurses in a particular department are willing to work for the lower wage (a wage that would make you, at your current wage, the highest-paid one there), then it is apparently legal for them to do that – or someone would likely have stopped the practice before now, right? – and it’s unlikely in the extreme that hospital management would want to start the sturm und drang that it would cause in the department to suddenly pay the least-experienced nurse in the group a wage that is higher than the most-experienced.