Nurses go on strike in New York City

NEW YORK — Thousands of nurses went on strike on Monday at two major hospitals in New York City, after contract negotiations stalled over staffing and salaries nearly three years into the COVID-19 pandemic.

The privately owned, nonprofit hospitals were postponing nonemergency surgeries, diverting ambulances to other medical centers, pulling in temporary staffers, and assigning administrators with nursing backgrounds to work in wards in order to cope with the walkout.

As many as 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan were off the job. Talks were resuming on Monday afternoon at Montefiore, but there was no immediate word on when bargaining might resume at Mount Sinai.

Hundreds of nurses picketed, some singing the chorus from Twisted Sister's 1984 hit We're Not Gonna Take It outside Mount Sinai. It was one of many New York hospitals deluged with COVID-19 patients.

"We were heroes only two years ago," Warren Urquhart, a nurse in transplant and oncology units, said. "We were on the front lines of the city when everything came to a stop. And now, we need to come to a stop so they can understand how much we mean to this hospital and to the patients."

The nurses union, the New York State Nurses Association, said members had to strike because chronic understaffing leaves them caring for too many patients.

Jed Basubas said he generally attends to eight to 10 patients at a time, twice the ideal number in the units where he works. Nurse practitioner Juliet Escalon said she sometimes skips bathroom breaks to attend to patients. So does Ashleigh Woodside, who said her 12-hour operating room shifts often stretch to 14 hours because short staffing forces her and others to work overtime.

"We love our job. We want to take care of our patients. But we just want to do it safely and in a humane way, where we feel appreciated," Woodside said.

The hospitals said they had offered the same raises — totaling 19 percent over three years — that the union had accepted at several other facilities where contract talks reached tentative agreements in recent days.

Montefiore said it had agreed to add 170 more nurses. Mount Sinai's administration said the union's focus on nurse-to-patient ratios "ignores the progress we have made to attract and hire more new nurses, despite a global shortage of healthcare workers that is impacting hospitals across the country".

The hospitals said on Monday that they had prepared for the strike and were working to minimize the disruption. Mount Sinai called the union's behavior "reckless".

Some patients, meanwhile, were left in limbo.

"As a patient, of course, I am annoyed and inconvenienced," Darcy Gervasio wrote in an email. But Gervasio, a union member herself, said she blames the hospital management, not the nurses.

"I am very disappointed in the administration for letting the nursing staffing crisis get out of hand in the first place — especially in the wake of the tremendous strain on nurses during the COVID pandemic," Gervasio wrote.

Agencies Via Xinhua