New York City expects biggest nurses strike as nearly 15,000 set to walk off job | New York

Thousands of nurses are expected to walk off their jobs Monday at several of New York City’s largest hospitals, staging a strike amid an intense flu season.

This action comes three years after a previous strike that forced some of these same hospitals to move patients elsewhere and reroute ambulances.

Hospital operations are expected to be disrupted at a number of major private institutions, including Mount Sinai in Manhattan, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Nearly 15,000 nurses participated, making it the largest nurses’ strike the city had ever seen. Most union members voted last month to authorize the walkout.

Anticipating the possibility of a strike, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency on Friday and urged hospital administrators and union leaders to reach a last-minute agreement. She warned that a strike “could endanger the lives of thousands of New Yorkers and patients.”

“I strongly encourage everyone to stay at the table, on both sides, management and nurses, until this issue is resolved,” Hochul said.

As with the 2023 labor dispute, the current conflict centers on a complex mix of grievances, rebuttals and hospital-specific concerns. Staffing remains a major source of contention, with nurses saying well-funded hospitals are unwilling to commit to standards that ensure safe and manageable workloads.

During this round of negotiations, the union is also pushing for hospitals to limit the use of artificial intelligence, as well as to improve workplace safety protections. In November, an armed man entered Mount Sinai, and earlier this week a man armed with a sharp object barricaded himself in a Brooklyn hospital room; the police ultimately killed both individuals.

The private, nonprofit hospitals involved say they have improved their staffing levels since 2023. Some hospital representatives say the union’s entire demands would be prohibitively expensive.

Dozens of nurses gathered in Manhattan on Friday to protest, saying they were focused on patient care and accusing hospital systems, whose top executives make millions each year, of prioritizing profit and refusing to compromise.

“My hospital is trying to downsize every day, and then they’re trying to fight the historic progress we made three years ago,” Sophie Boland, a pediatric critical care nurse in New York’s Presbyterian hospital system, told the Associated Press.

Hospital officials called the union’s strike threat “reckless.” In a statement released Thursday, they said they would “do whatever is necessary to minimize disruption.”

Nancy Hagans, union president of the New York State Nurses Association, also stressed that patients should not delay care in the event of a potential strike.

Mount Sinai has hired more than 1,000 temporary nurses and held preparatory drills for a strike that could affect its 1,100-bed main hospital and its two affiliates — Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West — each with about 500 beds.

NewYork-Presbyterian said it also had made arrangements to hire temporary nurses, but that in the event of a strike, some patients might be moved to new rooms or advised to transfer to another facility. Montefiore posted a message assuring patients that their appointments would be kept.

The same union organized a three-day strike at the flagship Mount Sinai facility and at Montefiore in 2023, when nurses voiced their sacrifices during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the national nursing crisis that followed.

The walkout prompted those hospitals to postpone elective surgeries, ask many ambulances to go elsewhere and transfer some infants and other patients to intensive care. Temporary nurses and even administrators with clinical training were tapped to replace them, but some patients noticed longer waits and understaffed departments.

The strike ended with an agreement on raises totaling 19 percent over three years and staffing improvements, including the possibility of additional pay if nurses had to work understaffed. The nurses’ previous contract expired on December 31.

Today, hospitals are abandoning these guarantees and failing to keep other promises, the union says.

Montefiore, for example, agreed to “make every reasonable effort” to stop keeping some emergency room patients in hallways while waiting for spaces to become available in other departments. Yet three years later, nurses are still struggling to treat “hallway patients,” Michelle Gonzalez, an intensive care nurse at Montefiore, told the Associated Press on Friday.

Montefiore suggested he had made some progress: The hospital told elected officials in a letter in October that there had been a 35 percent reduction in the time it took from emergency admission to a clinical unit bed.

Overall, hospitals say they have significantly reduced nursing vacancy rates over the past three years, and Mount Sinai Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia Irving University say they have also added hundreds of nursing positions.

In recent days, several small hospitals — including several Northwell Health facilities on Long Island — avoided potential walkouts by reaching agreements or making what the union considered adequate progress.