Nurses strike enters second day at major New York City hospitals

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NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of New York City nurses returned to the picket lines Tuesday as their strike targeting some of the city’s leading hospital systems entered its second day.

Union officials say roughly 15,000 nurses walked off the job Monday morning at multiple campuses of three hospital systems: NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore Medical Center and Mount Sinai.

The affected hospitals have hired droves of temporary nurses to try to fill the labor gap. Both nurses and hospital administrators have urged patients not to avoid getting care during the strike.

New York City, like the U.S. as a whole, has had an active flu season. The city logged over 32,000 cases during the week ending Dec. 20 — the highest one-week tally in at least 20 years — though numbers have since declined, the Health Department said last Thursday.

Roy Permaul, an intensive care unit nurse who was among those picketing in front of Mount Sinai's flagship campus in Manhattan, said he and his colleagues are prepared to walk off the job as long as needed to secure a better contract.

But Dania Munoz, a nurse practitioner at Mount Sinai, stressed that the union’s fight wasn’t just about better wages.

“We deserve fair pay, but this is about safety for our patients, for ourselves and for our profession,” the 31-year-old Bronx resident said. “The things that we’re fighting for, we need. We need health care. We need safety. We need more staffing.”

The New York State Nurses Association said Tuesday that none of the hospitals have agreed to additional bargaining sessions with the union since their last meetings on Sunday.

It also complained that Mount Sinai, which operates seven hospitals, unlawfully fired three nurses hours after the strike started and improperly disciplined 14 others who had spoken out about workplace violence or discussed the union and contract negotiations with their colleagues.

Mount Sinai said Tuesday the three nurses were fired last week for “deliberately sabotaging” the hospital's emergency preparedness drills ahead of the strike, including hiding supplies from replacement nurses in training. It said the “completely unacceptable behavior” was captured on security footage.

The hospital said around 20% of its regular nurses have so far opted to remain on duty rather than picketing.

Meanwhile, Montefiore Medical Center criticized unionized nurses for seeking “troubling proposals” such as demanding that nurses not be terminated, even if found to be compromised by drugs or alcohol while on the job.

The union said Montefiore was “blatantly mischaracterizing” one of its basic workplace proposals, which would have added protections for nurses dealing with substance use disorders and which has already been adopted in other hospitals around the state.

The city Emergency Management Department said it hasn’t seen major impacts to patient care so far.

The Greater New York Hospital Association, an industry group, said facilities hired and trained contract nurses to fill work gaps in anticipation of the walkouts.

The hospitals also canceled scheduled surgeries, transferred patients from more specialized units and increased discharges in recent days to streamline and reduce the number of patients they’re serving, the group said.

Ambulances also routed patients to other hospitals to help ease the burden on busier facilities on the first day of the strike, though no diversions were reported Tuesday, according to Brian Conway, a spokesperson for the association.

Montefiore said it has “not canceled even one patient’s access to care” during the work stoppage.

The labor action comes three years after a similar strike forced medical facilities to transfer some patients and divert ambulances.

As with the 2023 labor action, nurses have pointed to staffing issues as a major flashpoint, accusing the big-budget medical centers of refusing to commit to provisions for safe, manageable workloads.

The private, nonprofit hospitals involved in the current negotiations say they’ve made strides in staffing in recent years and have cast the union’s demands as prohibitively expensive.

On Monday, the city's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, stood beside nurses on a picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian, praising the union’s members for seeking “dignity, respect and the fair pay and treatment that they deserve.”