We All Must Stand With NYC Nurses on Strike

Solidarity with the 15,000 New York City nurses at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Montefiore Medical Center, and the Mount Sinai Hospital, who have launched the city’s largest-ever nurses’ strike.

The rank-and-file members of CWA District 1, NYSNA, and 1199SEIU are demanding safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, higher wages, full healthcare coverage and pensions, and increased security at hospitals to minimize violent episodes and shootings.

Working people around the country need to fully support them in their courageous strike. We also need to demand that the Mount Sinai administration immediately reinstate the three labor and delivery nurses they unjustly fired on the eve of the strike’s first day.

Labor unions should build national solidarity and financially support the nurses. My organization, Workers Strike Back, has donated $500 to the strike fund of the nurses’ unions.

Pressure from mass anger at the cruel healthcare system in America coupled with broad and powerful working-class support for the nurses is forcing several New York Democratic Party politicians to publicly support the strike. The unions must organize to harness this mass support for the strike by mobilizing the wider working-class community to help force the hand of the hospital administrations.

Democratic Party politicians, including NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have emphasized that the hospital administrators must “bargain in good faith,” clearly implying that the nurses could have their demands met if only that was done.

This is a false idea. The bosses will not “bargain in good faith.” They will fight tooth and nail against even modest demands by workers. The only way for the workers to win is to build a powerful strike. Bosses only concede when they feel a credible threat to their profits and reputations. In order to strengthen the balance of power in favor of the striking nurses, we need citywide nurses’ unions, and unions across New York state, to carry out solidarity work stoppages. The leadership of the wider labor movement in NYC should call for mass protests and mobilize tens of thousands of workers and union members to the picket line.

Socialist politicians have an obligation to use their offices to help in the combat against the hospital administrations, instead of sowing illusions in the idea that bosses and workers can have common ground.

The fight to improve the wages and working conditions of healthcare workers will be greatly strengthened by tying it to a powerful nationwide fight for a system of universal healthcare.Workers Strike Back is fighting for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, as a historic step towards establishing a nationwide system of socialized medicine and eliminating the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Neither For-Profit Nor Nonprofit Bosses Care About Working People

Even though the three hospitals involved in the strike are nonprofit in structure, their actual functioning is largely similar to for-profit corporations because they exist in the context of capitalism. The executives pay themselves stratospheric salaries, they prioritize their connections with the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations over the health of working-class and poor patients, and they cut staffing to the bone and pay their employees as little as possible.

In 2024, NewYork-Presbyterian CEO Steve Corwin was paid $26.3 million. As the unions have pointed out in the picket line speeches, that’s over $2.1 million per month, and nearly $72,000 per day. In 2023, Montefiore’s CEO Philip Ozuah was paid $16.4 million in total compensation, making him the second highest-paid hospital executive in the New York area. Between 2020 and 2023, his pay more than doubled, increasing by 120 percent.

In 2024, New York-Presbyterian, Montefiore, and Mount Sinai had net revenues of $1.4 billion, $314 million, and $127 million, respectively. Almost none of these surplus dollars have been used to improve staffing rates and workers’ wages and benefits.

Mount Sinai has affiliated venture capital funds that run a private for-profit company. According to the unions, the administrators and executives at Mount Sinai have “invested untold millions in artificial intelligence, which aims to replace human care with machine care…. their largest investments in a single AI facility totaled over $100 million.”

These hospitals are among the world’s largest and most leading medical centers that pride themselves on high-quality patient care. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital was ranked the seventh-best hospital in the United States in 2022.

Yet, the boards and administrations of every single one of the hospitals have engaged in systematic and ruthless cost-cutting that has had severely negative impacts on patients, nurses, and other employees.

The high rankings of the hospitals are primarily thanks to the dedication and talent of the physicians, nurses, clinical researchers, and other hospital staff. But it’s those very workers who are badly exploited on an ongoing basis by the bosses.

In a commonly used strike-breaking tactic, the boards at the hospitals have spent a whopping $100 million to hire temporary nurses. Mount Sinai hospital, for example, has already brought in 1,400 temporary nurses to undercut the nurses on strike.

This eye-popping spending by the hospital bosses completely belies their false claims that they cannot afford to meet the nurses’ demands. It is also a grim reminder of how the capitalist class will be ruthless in their attempt to crush worker fightback. Most importantly, it points to why workers so desperately need regional, national, and international solidarity on a class basis. Efforts by the ruling class to divide and splinter the working class are endemic under capitalism in order to keep rebellion at bay.

The only way for us to counter capitalism’s divide-and-conquer race to the bottom is to unrelentingly insist on working-class solidarity. Concretely, the current strike would be greatly strengthened if other nurses’ unions in NYC, and allied unions in New York state and New Jersey, carried out solidarity strikes, starting with a one-day coordinated work stoppage, except for emergency patient services.

In addition to the enormous sums they are spending to hire scab workers, the hospital bosses have also spent undisclosed amounts of money to pay the exorbitant attorney fees to fight against the nurses in the courts.

Why do bosses spend inordinate sums of money fighting against their employees instead of just paying to fulfill modest demands from the workers?

For the bosses, even such big expenses to crush worker fightback are a small price compared to what it would cost them when workers win any significant victory. This is because victories among any section of workers raise the morale of the working class as a whole, and send the message that when we fight, we can win. That is a dangerous message as far as the billionaires and multimillionaires are concerned, so they are willing to go to great lengths to prevent working people from being emboldened to fight for their interests.

America Has Scandalously Low Nurse-to-Patient Staffing Ratios

In the world’s richest nation, minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios are legally mandated only in Oregon, California, New York, and Massachusetts. And even in these states, extremely poor enforcement is an endemic and pervasive problem.

A 2021 study by the National Institute of Nursing Research unsurprisingly reveals a high nurse-to-patient ratio to be a key determinant of patient health and recovery rate. The study shows that each additional patient per nurse increased the likelihood of death, length of hospital stays, and chances of needing to be re-hospitalized within 30 days. It’s revealing of the nature of capitalism that despite all this devastating data, the bosses at the NYC hospitals have called the union’s reasonable demands “extreme” and “reckless.”

Hospital administrators and corporate healthcare systems rely on nurses’ compassion and sense of obligation towards their patients to push them beyond safe limits. They know that nurses will stretch themselves, skip breaks, work understaffed shifts, and absorb emotional trauma rather than abandon those in need. Stretched thin by unsafe staffing levels, chronic stress, and deteriorating working conditions, it’s not surprising that fully 40 percent of nurses state that they plan to leave the profession within the next five years because their jobs have become unsustainable.

Using the momentum for essential workers to take substantial steps forward in the wake of the Covid pandemic, nurses’ unions in New York state organized to win the Safe Staffing for Quality Care Act in 2021. The law mandates all hospital ICUs in New York to comply with a 1:2 nurse-to-patient ratio. The law also requires hospitals to provide on-call coverage for registered nurses, ensuring that staffing ratios can be maintained in the event the scheduled nurses cannot report to work.

However, the lack of hospital compliance with these regulations is shocking, including in the high-profile hospitals.

The nurses’ unions have provided some stark examples of how these hospitals routinely and blatantly flout the law:

+ Some of the nurses are forced to work with 1:3 nurse-to-patient ratios in the ICU departments, when the ratio required by the law and necessary for adequate care is 1:2 for critical and intensive care patients.

+ Entire patient care units are being left without any care attendants, leaving patients without being changed, cleaned, or provided their medication.

+ Management mandates staff to work beyond their scheduled hours on a regular basis.

It’s Not About “Good Faith Bargaining” — It’s About Building Class Struggle

It is crucial that the rank and file at the nurses’ strike, and at all strike actions, be geared towards building the strongest possible action to force the bosses to concede.

Workers need to reject any suggestion that “fair agreements” can be reached on the basis of bosses acting “in good faith.”

The Democratic Party’s New York State Senator Robert Jackson urged hospital administrators “to negotiate in good faith.” New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said that it is “unfathomable that these hospitals show such complete disregard for the pressure under which these nurses work and for all they do for their patients each day.” Cilento also said that the hospitals need to “negotiate in good faith.” and quickly to ensure nurses can get back to serving their communities by providing superior care to their patients. New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, President Brendan Griffith declared that nurses “have made every effort to reach fair agreements … in good faith.” Mamdani exhausted “all parties” to “return immediately to the negotiating table” and “bargain in good faith.”

These statements represent a fundamental misunderstanding. Capitalism is a zero-sum game. Billionaires and multimillionaires only make profits by exploiting workers and using a strategy of dividing and disempowering us. Conversely, workers only win when we get organized to build our collective power in a class-based struggle to defeat the bosses and take away a portion of their profits.

Any suggestion that workers win victories through “both sides” coming to the “bargaining table” and meeting in “good faith” instead of collectively fighting for our interests is utterly misleading and ahistorical.

The only way workers have ever won substantial gains under capitalism is when we get organized and fight. Going on strike is the clearest and most crucial expression of such a fightback. Rather than expect that the hospital bosses are open to moral persuasion, the rank-and-file nurses should organize a militant strategy including publicly appealing to other unions in the city and state to join their struggle.

This is why, as a socialist, I take issue with Mamdani’s “good faith bargaining” position on the strike. It is far too neutral for someone identifying as a socialist. A socialist representative in office must squarely and unambiguously stand with workers on strike, and help lead mass movements to decisively defeat the bosses through class struggle, as I did over my decade in office as an elected Marxist in Seattle.

The Fight for Healthcare Workers Is Tied to the Fight for Free Healthcare for All

As working people, we need to tie our individual struggles on specific demands to wider struggles for far-reaching change.

The courageous strike action by nurses in NYC shows the urgency of a universal public healthcare system, which is also why Workers Strike Back is calling for free healthcare for all by taxing the rich.

The U.S. for-profit healthcare system is driven not just by individual hospital institutions, but by the ruthless for-profit insurance industry, medical device corporations, and Big Pharma. In turn, the majority of the shares of these companies are held by investment corporations like BlackRock, which manages a monstrous $13 trillion in assets. In other words, the same billionaires and multimillionaires who own most of the nation’s overall wealth are also the ones profiting from a healthcare system that is roughly twice as expensive as the public healthcare in other industrialized countries and results in far worse outcomes for tens of millions of working people and their families. Trump’s attacks on Medicare and Medicaid, which the Democrats refused to fight, have only degraded the U.S. system further.

The public healthcare systems in Canada and Western Europe were won as victories of past battles of working-class people and union members, under socialist leadership. They were hard fought and hard won.

We need such mass movements today, to fight in the U.S. for free healthcare for all by taxing the rich. Healthcare workers have a real stake in building the fight for such a system, in which nurses, researchers, and staff will not only have well-paying unionized jobs, but also a real democratic say over practices and procedures such as staffing ratios, treatment options, and an orientation towards preventative healthcare.

The experience in states like California and Vermont decisively shows that no universal healthcare system, let alone free healthcare, can be won by putting our faith in the Democratic Party. Democrats are just as heavily bankrolled by the wealthy, and have repeatedly stymied and crushed efforts by the labor movement, while performatively acting like they support it.

The movement for free healthcare and for workplace rights will need the kind of independent working-class leadership provided by my socialist Seattle City Council office for a decade. By using my office to fight big business and the Democratic Party, I was able to help lead victories like the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, and unprecedented renters’ rights. We won these through class struggle methods, not by trusting the billionaires and their Democratic Party spokespeople to act in “good faith.”

We need to join each of our individual fights to the struggle for a socialist world in which healthcare is a basic right of all people.

Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist, a founding member of Workers Strike Back, and a former Seattle City Councilmember who led the movement to win the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing. Kshama is now running for the U.S. Congress as an independent antiwar socialist.

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