After nearly a month on the picket line, over 10,000 nurses at four New York City hospitals will return to work since voting to approve a new contract. Negotiations continue for another 4,000 nurses at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital who rejected the proposal and will continue the strike until their demands are met.
As the city reached record low temperatures and recorded the heaviest snowfall in years, nurses stood strong on the picket line. In the freezing temperatures, hundreds of striking nurses shared homemade soup and formed a human chain encircling several city blocks.
While the new contract does include a minimal raise for nurses that barely matches the increased cost of living, nurses on the picket line emphasized that their demands were primarily about safety for themselves and their patients. The new contract maintains enforcement for safe staffing levels and hires more nurses so that each nurse is assigned to a safe number of patients. Research has repeatedly shown that safe staffing ratios literally save patient lives.
Nurses also won greater protection for immigrant and trans patients and workers, increased safety measures to prevent workplace violence, and safeguards against untested applications of artificial intelligence.
Despite increasing financial demands, including most nurses losing their health insurance during the strike, nurses maintained that their safety concerns were too important to ignore, and refused to bow to management pressure to end the strike early. Hospital executives argued that nurses were ignoring the financial constraints they were facing, while simultaneously spending over $100 million on short-term scab staffing during the strike, and taking home multimillion dollar salaries themselves.
For the remaining nurses on strike who did not vote to ratify the contract, they stand firm that the agreement does not go far enough to protect workers and patients. Nurses at New York-Presbyterian were outraged that top union officials had violated their bylaws by holding a contract vote despite the contract’s rejection by their local executive committee. Nurses stood by their elected local union leadership and voted to remain on strike in a powerful show of rank-and-file solidarity.
Workers everywhere are inspired by the 15,000 nurses who braved a month of snowstorm picketing to speak up for their patients and fellow workers. We continue to support the remaining strikers as they stay true to their demands. The number of healthcare worker strikes will only increase as the safety of patients and workers continues to confront the escalating cruelties of our capitalist healthcare system. We stand with the nurses of New York and around the world in their fight to make healthcare safe and accessible for everyone.
