On Monday, 12 January, nearly 15,000 nurses launched a strike at three private sector hospital systems in New York City. Nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) have walked out at multiple campuses of Montefiore Einstein Medical Center, Mount Sinai Health System, and New York\u2013Presbyterian Hospital in the largest nurses\u2019 strike in the city\u2019s history and one of the largest in the history of the United States.<\/p>\n
Nurses say that the hospitals are stonewalling them on key proposals. Those include demands around safe-staffing ratios; nurses say understaffing is a major issue that leads to burnout of staff and worse patient care. Nurses are also attempting to establish better protections against workplace violence for hospital staff and to resist cuts to their health care benefits, among other demands.<\/p>\n
Jacobin\u00a0contributor Sara Wexler joined nurses on the picket lines at Mount Sinai\u2019s Morningside campus. She spoke to nurses there about their key contract proposals, why bargaining has broken down, and fighting back against their employer\u2019s union-busting efforts.<\/p>\n
SARA WEXLER<\/p>\n
Why are you all on strike today?<\/p>\n
SIMONE WAY<\/p>\n
We are on strike currently because our employers will not guarantee health care benefits for their nurses. They will not guarantee investing into our pensions. They will not guarantee workplace violence protections for all of the staff here.<\/p>\n
They will not guarantee safe staffing enforcement for the nurses here. And we know for a fact when staffing is low, errors are made by nurses, and patient care is diminished. Management is also not entertaining, at this current moment, any wage proposals that we have given them.<\/p>\n
YASHIRA MARTINEZ<\/p>\n
We\u2019re fighting at this moment for safe staffing. It\u2019s unfair, but we don\u2019t have any patient-to-nurse ratios in the Emergency Department. So we\u2019re fighting for the safety of the patients. We\u2019re fighting for our sanity at the end of the shift and for our health care to remain the same. We have nurses that are near retirement, fighting out here daily, fighting for their health care pensions to continue fairly.<\/p>\n
We are obviously fighting for wages because we are definitely underpaid and overworked. It\u2019s been a dream of mine to become an ER nurse, and I feel fulfilled in that sense. But it would feel even better if we were heard, if we were seen, and if we were under a fair contract.<\/p>\n
MARVIN DUNCAN<\/p>\n
The working conditions and the lack of patient safety is something that is really bothering us. This is why we\u2019re out today, and possibly for the entire week, to ensure that we\u2019re able to receive proper patient conditions, conditions that are conducive for healing and conditions that are conducive for providing the care that patients need in this community.<\/p>\n
Having a nurse taking care of fifteen patients while they need to attend to traumas is beyond something I can really imagine. Nurses should receive ratios that are reasonable and not ratios that would put their licenses in jeopardy.<\/p>\n
SARA WEXLER<\/p>\n
What have contract negotiations been like leading up to this point?<\/p>\n
SHELLA DOMINGUEZ<\/p>\n
We started negotiating last September. The employer has not given us a lot of agreements. We still have a lot on the table that needs to be discussed, like safe staffing; we haven\u2019t agreed on that. [Or on] workplace violence protections, which we really need, because a lot of nurses \u2014 not only nurses, but also other staff members \u2014 have been affected by violence inside the hospital.<\/p>\n
The employer sometimes takes a break for a long period of time [during bargaining] \u2014 two to three hours we\u2019re waiting at the table. And the last few days of negotiations, management hasn\u2019t really sat at the table and talked to us.<\/p>\n
SIMONE WAY<\/p>\n
It has been very interesting coming to the table with our management. We started [contract bargaining] in September. But we have meetings with management every single month on staffing and labor issues. One of [those meetings] is a requirement by New York State, and the others are meetings that we participate in as nurses on the executive committee for the union.<\/p>\n
When we meet with management every single month, we have a lot of the same issues. We talk about staffing every month. We\u2019ve brought nurses from multiple units in-person to testify and tell about the situations on their particular units, and we advocate for them to increase staffing on those units. A lot of times it\u2019s for nurses, but it could also be for ancillary staff like the attendants that help us to do our jobs. And management looks at us as if we have three heads. They have no responses for the things that we bring to the table; they do not address them.<\/p>\n
So us getting to this point is not foreign to them. We just presented a lot of the same things that have been unresolved over the year to them at the bargaining table in hopes that [we could resolve some of these issues], and they will not discuss it. Anything that costs this institution a financial component, they will not entertain. When we tell them that we want [better] staffing: \u201cThat\u2019s economic, and we\u2019re not talking about economic [proposals].\u201d That is their response. If we talk to management about something noneconomic, it can take us two to three sessions to iron out one little thing, and they will nitpick on every piece of language.<\/p>\n
We tried to get a proposal across to them in regard to what we call \u201cnonnursing functions\u201d: nurses waste a lot of time doing things that we shouldn\u2019t be doing, because they have other entities in the hospital to do it, like nurses cleaning beds. That\u2019s what Environmental Service does. So why are nurses doing it? We were speaking to them about that for a very long time. We went back and forth for three sessions, and they could not come to an agreement with us on those things. They got hung up on the word \u201cor\u201d because we put in there that you couldn\u2019t do something except for an emergency, and they wanted us to insert or remove the word \u201cor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three sessions they wasted over that. And when I say three sessions, that means management comes in, we meet in the mornings at 10 a.m., we present things to them by noon, they go out, they say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to go to lunch; we\u2019re going to caucus.\u201d And then they might come back at 2 p.m., and then they leave at 3 p.m. because they claim, \u201cI have a meeting.\u201d Somebody has a meeting, and then they leave with no resolution, and then they call us at 5 p.m. and say, \u201cWe\u2019re not returning.\u201d<\/p>\n
So we may get two to three hours of effective talking back and forth, but nothing is getting done. They\u2019ve done this since September. This has been their MO.<\/p>\n