Nurses Hold the Line for Workplace Safety
MANHATTAN – New York City nurses began the fourth week of their historic strike Monday morning in below-freezing weather, reiterating their call for safe staffing levels, protection from violence at work, and improved health care benefits. Scores of nurses marked the occasion by gathering at Grand Central Terminal and marching to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s nearby office; others resumed their pickets outside of multiple Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and NewYork-Presbyterian hospitals in the Bronx and Manhattan.
Music was pumping at the picket line in front of Mount Sinai West on the Upper West Side, where nurses and supporters donned red hats and scarves, carried signs bearing the slogan “Quality Healthcare for All,” and peeled off for hot coffee at a nearby table when the cold grew too bitter.
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Jennifer, an operating room nurse at Mount Sinai West, stood near another table where marchers could grab sets of hand warmers. Like other nurses, she has been disappointed in management’s refusal to bargain and Hochul’s tacit support of the bosses over workers. Hochul extended an executive order allowing outside personnel to work during the strike through early February, which striking workers said erodes their power.
Some nurses also said they were frustrated by recent media reports focusing on their salaries, which they said was the lowest priority on their list of demands.
“We have dedicated our life to this,” Jennifer said Monday, gesturing to the hospital behind her. She urged executives to come back to find a way to end the strike and secure a safe work environment at the hospital. “I really hope they hear us out.”
Other workers noted that hospital executives had threatened to replace them permanently if they didn’t end their strike; some were incredulous that executives found their proposals “extreme” and “reckless.” Recent expenditures show they have enough money to safely staff their hospitals; chief executives at Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and NewYork-Presbyterian all increased their compensation in recent years by tens of millions of dollars.
NewYork-Presbyterian CEO Steven Corwin got the biggest bump. His pay rose from $14.6 million in 2023 to $26.3 million in 2024, making him the highest-paid nonprofit employee in the city that year.
At Montefiore, CEO Philip Ozuah drew a $16.7 million paycheck in 2024, about half a million more than the year before, making him the second-highest-paid nonprofit employee.
And Mount Sinai’s CEO, Kenneth Davis, took home $8.4 million, about half a million more than the year before.
Together, the three executives have spent more than $100 million on travel nurses, rather than using that money to settle the contract.
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) would not comment on the threat of replacing workers permanently. A spokesman for Montefiore did not answer a question about replacing the workers and said that the hospital has “rolled out several key programs to keep nurses safe in the workplace,” including “paying for round-the-clock armed members of the NYPD, well-trained internal security personnel, and issuing wearable panic buttons to our nurses.”
Nurses told the Prospect that when they ask for help from security and police they are routinely rebuffed.
Spokespeople at the other two hospital systems did not respond to a request for information and comment.
NEARLY 15,000 NURSES HAVE BEEN ON STRIKE in New York since January 12, holding the line through freezing weather, rain, and snow to execute the largest nursing strike in the city’s history. Support has poured in, including from state Attorney General Letitia James, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Democratic city-area U.S. Reps. Adriano Espaillat, Grace Meng, Jerry Nadler, and Nydia Velázquez.
Health care workers are at a breaking point all over the country, especially after Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez executed Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Combined with an unfair labor practice strike of 31,000 nurses and health care workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities throughout California and in Hawaii that is now entering its second week, nurses everywhere are demanding protection and safe working conditions. At a vigil for Pretti last week, NYSNA President Nancy Hagans tied together a range of threats facing nurses, including from both bosses and immigration agents.
“People should know about nurses, we are not easily intimidated. Alex Pretti showed that when he went back onto the street to protest shortly after ICE agents broke his ribs when he was protecting his immigrant neighbors,” she said. “His last words were ones of compassion. ‘Are you OK?’ I’m here to tell you we are not OK. I see the attack on our communities, on our neighbors, on our patients, on our fellow nurses are not OK, but like Alex Pretti, we’re still not gonna back down. We will continue to fight for justice and for everyone in our communities.”
Workers from across New York City have joined nurses’ picket lines, including from 1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, CWA District 1, DSA-NYC, DC37 AFSCME, Hotel & Gaming Trades Council, the New York City Fire Department, PSC-CUNY, UAW Region 9A, WGAE, and the NYC Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO. On Monday, multiple IATSE marchers walked alongside nurses, carrying signs that said “Local One Supports NYC Nurses.”
Nurses notched a victory at the end of last week when executives at Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian signed an agreement maintaining NYSNA Plan A health benefits for nurses with no cuts, a major sticking point at those two hospital systems. But bosses have failed to meet nurses’ demands for a safe workplace, an issue that’s been at the top of their list, especially after recent shooting deaths inside their hospitals.
The strike comes after a November incident in which a man threatened to “shoot up” a Mount Sinai hospital before cops shot him dead. Shortly afterward, hospital management wrote up two nurses and suspended a third because they voiced concerns about hospital safety in public. NYSNA objected, calling the punishment illegal retaliation, and prepared formal grievances to the National Labor Relations Board; it has filed six unfair labor practice complaints against Mount Sinai since October. New York City’s employer violation dashboard also shows Mount Sinai has been a repeat violator of labor law since the comptroller’s office began collecting data in 2022, including alleged wage theft.
In a more recent incident, a man at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital last month threatened to hurt staff with a sharp object and locked himself in a hospital room. Cops tased him first, and when that didn’t work, shot him dead, too.
Striking nurses recounted in interviews with the Prospect how they experience violence at work practically every day. But management typically responds to requests for help by scolding them, if they respond at all, they said.
Jeudy, who spoke on condition of using her first name only, and who has worked at Mount Sinai Morningside for about 13 years, described how nurses endure violence from patients, including some who curse them out, spit at them, and attack them physically. As a charge nurse, she views herself as the bodyguard responsible for standing between a violent person and other nurses. But she’s usually on her own in that role, because security downplays her requests and management pretends nothing is wrong, she said.
Working in that kind of environment “affects us because you ask yourself, do you really want to go back to this?” she told the Prospect. “It’s a lot for me because I have to be the captain … as a charge nurse, nobody is going to leave that unit getting hurt.” And if someone does, she said she feels she’s failed them.
Nurses are afraid to return to work each day, said Aretha Morgan, a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian. She counts herself among those fearing the job.
“I’m one of countless nurses that are struggling, exhausted, and increasingly afraid to come to work. We love our patients but we don’t feel safe at work,” she said in an interview. Her voice was hoarse from chanting on the picket line in the cold as she described patients and others pushing, grabbing, and assaulting nurses more frequently, especially in high-stress periods such as the ongoing flu outbreak.
“This rise in violence is causing a very big anxiety,” she said. “Instead of fear we should be focused on being confident and taking care of our patients.”
Nurses also fear for the safety of those in their care, because there are too few nurses for the number of people who need them. Both NYSNA and United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), which is leading the Kaiser Permanente strike, have put safe staffing and patient care protections at the top of their list of priorities.
Morgan works in the emergency room, where management can task nurses with caring for up to 20 patients at a time, a workload that stretches her so thin that she fears for everyone’s well-being.
“Our patients are critically ill, unstable, and in urgent need of immediate care. If you have one or two of those types of patients, you can manage,” she said. “But when you are tasked with 5, 10, 15, 20, it’s just unsustainable.” She disputed the often-cited claim that a shortage of nurses is preventing hospital executives from hiring more. “It’s not that New York state doesn’t have enough nurses, it’s that the hospitals won’t hire enough nurses,” Morgan said. There are millions of nurses, she said, but they “refuse to work in unsafe hospitals.”
Spokespeople for the three hospital systems failed to respond to a request for comment regarding nurses’ safety.
NEW YORK LEGISLATORS IN 2021 PASSED a safe-staffing law, establishing a universal 1:2 ratio of nurses to patients for critical care patients and directed all hospitals to set minimum safe-staffing standards. But hospitals have failed to comply or publicly disclose certain information as required, according to a survey NYSNA conducted. It found that there were approximately 4.6 million people around the country with active registered nursing licenses, “yet only 3.3 million people are employed as RNs, with 1.8 million employed in hospitals,” the survey found. A similar dynamic is playing out at the state level, according to New York’s Department of Health.
There are 415,000 licensed registered nurses in New York, according to the data. But just 63 percent are active and working in the state, and just 49 percent of those who are working do so in patient care.
In other words, the so-called nurse shortage at hospitals could be solved by offering jobs that available nurses want to take. Yet the myth is so accepted as conventional wisdom that it’s even reflected in legal documents, such as Hochul’s executive order, which declared a disaster emergency and said striking nurses were causing hospitals “to experience severe staffing shortages, affecting the availability and delivery of care, including to vulnerable populations.”
When asked what they’d like to see from the community, nurses responded by inviting everyone to their picket lines.
“Please join us, call our governor, call everybody who can help us in this situation,” Jeudy said. “When we have safe staffing, it’s for the community … it’s about all of us.”
Picket lines and start times can be found here.
James Baratta contributed reporting.
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