Thousands of nurses who went on strike on Monday at two of the city’s major hospitals were still protesting on Tuesday after contract negotiations on staffing and wages stalled nearly three years after the coronavirus pandemic began.
Private and non-profit hospitals have been postponing non-urgent surgeries, rerouting ambulances to other medical facilities, hiring temporary staff, and assigning experienced nursing administrators to labor departments to deal with the strike.
Up to 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan were on leave. Negotiations resumed on Monday afternoon in Montefiore, but it is not known when they will be able to resume at Mount Sinai.
Hundreds of nurses picketed, some singing the chorus of Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” in front of Mount Sinai. It was one of many New York hospitals flooded with COVID-19 patients as the virus turned the city into an epicenter of deaths in the spring of 2020.
“We were heroes just two years ago,” said Warren Urquhart, a nurse in the transplant and oncology units. “We were on the front lines of the city when everything stopped. And now we have to stand up so they understand how much we mean to this hospital and the patients.”
The nurses’ union, the New York State Nurses Association, said its members were forced to go on strike because chronic understaffing leads them to see too many patients.
Jed Basubas said he typically sees eight to 10 patients at a time, double the ideal number in the units where he works. Nurse Juliet Escalon says she sometimes skips bathroom breaks to attend to patients. Ditto for Ashleigh Woodside, who says her 12-hour shifts in the OR often stretch to 2 as staff shortages force her and others to work overtime.
“We love our job. We want to take care of our patients. But we want to do it in a safe and humane way, while feeling valued,” Woodside said.
The hospitals said they had offered the same raises – totaling 19% over three years – that the union had accepted at several other centers where contract talks reached tentative deals in recent days.
Montefiore said he has agreed to add 170 more nurses. The Mount Sinai administration said the union’s focus on the nurse-patient relationship “ignores the progress we’ve made in attracting and hiring more new nurses, despite the global shortage of health care workers plaguing hospitals across the country.” .
Hospitals said on Monday they had prepared for the strike and were working to minimize disruption. Mount Sinai called the union’s behavior “reckless,” while Montefiore said the strike was causing “fear and uncertainty throughout our community.”
“In my opinion, this action was completely unnecessary,” Montefiore chairman Dr. Philip Ozuah told employees Monday afternoon in a statement. Ozuah argued that the two sides had been close to agreeing to “a very generous offer”.
Some patients, meanwhile, have remained in limbo.
Darcy Gervasio took medical leave from her job at a suburban college library, arranged childcare and transportation, ran tests, and prepared for gastrointestinal surgery that was scheduled for Monday but is now had to postpone indefinitely, he said. Although the procedure is considered elective, Gervasio said it’s essential for managing his Crohn’s disease.
“As a patient, of course, I am angry and upset,” she wrote in an email. But Gervasio, a union member, said he blamed the hospital management, not the nurses.
“I am very disappointed with the administration for allowing the nursing crisis to get out of hand in the first place, especially in the wake of the tremendous pressure on nurses during the COVID pandemic,” Gervasio wrote. He asked why Mount Sinai hasn’t been able to reach an agreement with the union when several other local hospitals have done so in the past two weeks.
Gov. Kathy Hochul urged the union and hospitals Sunday night to submit their dispute to binding arbitration.
Montefiore’s management had said they were willing to have the contract defined by an arbitrator; the union did not immediately accept the proposal.
In a statement, the union said Hochul, a Democrat, “should listen to nursing heroes on the front lines of COVID and respect our federally protected labor and collective bargaining rights.”
A host of other Democratic city and state politicians, including Attorney General Letitia James, joined a union rally at noon Monday.
Both hospitals had prepared for the strike by transferring patients, including newborns, from the Mount Sinai ICU. Representatives from the state Department of Health were at the two medical centers on Monday to monitor staffing levels, the agency said.
Montefiore and Mount Sinai are the latest in a group of hospitals with simultaneously expiring nursing contracts. The union initially warned it would hit them all at once, but other hospitals grappled as the deadline approached. All include increases of 7%, 6% and 5% over the next three years.
