New York City nurses reach deal to end strike at two hospital systems
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Nurses in New York City reached a tentative agreement earlier this week to end a strike at two of three major health systems that has lasted a month and involved nearly 15,000 workers, according to their union.
A deal was reached with the Mount Sinai Health System as well as Montefiore Medical Center, and covers 10,500 of the striking health care workers. The union and other people with direct knowledge of the negotiations said that the nurses will receive a raise of about 12% over three years.
The strike continued at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, the union said.
The tentative agreements will be put to a vote of the nurses over the next few days. If the deal is approved, the striking nurses will return to work within 72 hours of the vote.
The walkout has sent a jolt through New York’s medical system. Elective surgeries were canceled. Some patients were transferred to hospitals unaffected by the strike. And a few thousand travel nurses were hired on weeklong contracts to do the jobs of the striking health care workers.
The strike against some of the city’s leading medical institutions — including the main campus of Mount Sinai Hospital along with two other major hospitals within the Mount Sinai system — came at a steep cost. Cumulatively, the hospitals spent more than $100 million to hire temporary nurses.
Denash Forbes, a nurse in the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai West and a union official, said that after a month of protesting in numbingly cold weather, the tentative pact with the hospital represented a historic victory.
“Nurses have never gone out this long,” Forbes said. “We stood our ground on the things that mattered to our patients, to us, and for the community, so I think this spoke volumes.”
In an email to the staff of the Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Brendan G. Carr, the CEO, said that once the agreement was approved by union members, the striking nurses would start returning to their posts. He also acknowledged the fissures left by the walkout.
“This process has been difficult for all of us,” Carr wrote. “I commit to you that we will heal the organization together in the service of continuing to help people to live longer and better lives.”
The negotiations between the hospitals and the nurses union, the New York State Nurses Association,unfolded in a lower level of the Javits Convention Center during marathon bargaining sessions even as the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show filled much of the convention center.
The main sticking points involved pay, minimum staffing levels in hospital wards and protections to reduce workplace violence.
“Now, nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai systems are heading back to the bedside with our heads held high after winning fair tentative contracts,” Nancy Hagans, president of the nurses union, said in a statement.
Hagans said the tentative agreements “maintain enforceable safe staffing ratios, improve protections from workplace violence and maintain health benefits with no additional out-of-pocket costs for front-line nurses.”
The union’s executive director, Pat Kane, said that the nurses “sacrificed their own pay and health care while on strike to defend patient care for all of New York.”
On Monday, a few details emerged regarding the ongoing negotiations at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia. The hospital issued a statement asserting that it was willing to pay the same wage increases agreed to by the other hospital systems.
“We look forward to bringing our nurses back to care for our patients,” Angela Karafazli, a NewYork-Presbyterian spokesperson, said.
Beth Loudin, a neonatal nurse on the union’s bargaining committee at NewYork-Presbyterian, said that a few unresolved issues stood in the way of reaching an agreement with the hospital.
The two sides, for instance, had yet to reach a resolution on minimum nurse staffing levels. Loudin said the nurses needed further job security protections, especially in light of layoffs at NewYork-Presbyterian that cut about 2% of the workforce.
Jaiveer Grewal, a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian and a union official, said the hospital and nurses union had bargained on Sunday, but that the nurses still needed solutions for three major demands in writing before they would agree to leave the picket line. “Right now, the fight is for staffing, staffing enforcement and job security,” Grewal said.
The strike proved to be an unexpected test for the city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who took office not quite two weeks before it began and twice appeared in support of the nurses on their picket line. Hagans said that she received a message from Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mamdani last month after negotiations had stalled, urging the parties to return to the bargaining table.
The strike left many nurses feeling betrayed by the governor. On Jan. 9, Hochul had signed an executive order that declared an emergency because of health care staffing shortages, which allowed the hospitals to hire out-of-state nurses to work during the strike, even if they didn’t have New York licenses. Thousands of travel nurses worked short-term contracts for about $9,000 a week. Many nurses said that Hochul’s action had undermined the strike by alleviating the pressure on hospitals. On Feb. 2, nurses marched to her office in New York City.
That same day, Hochul extended the order but only for two days. The extension stated that it was to ensure patient safety, not “to afford leverage to any party in collective bargaining.” She subsequently extended the order several more times.
After three weeks of halting talks that saw little progress, the two sides began making headway last week, with negotiations extending late into the night some days. Negotiators on both sides spent days hashing out what security systems hospitals would place at entryways. At some hospitals, such as Mount Sinai, nurses wanted metal detectors and armed police officers. Hospital officials, meanwhile, wanted to rely on weapon detection systems that used artificial intelligence and a range of sensors — but did not create long lines or waits.
It was only in recent days that the two sides made much headway on the other core issues, including staffing minimums and pay.
The strike dragged on far longer than many nurses had anticipated. When the strike began, many had expected a repeat of 2023, when a smaller group of nurses walked out and hospitals were buoyed by federal bailout money that subsidized them during the coronavirus pandemic. Hailed as heroes who held the line during the deadly first wave of COVID-19 amid widespread burnout and deteriorating working conditions, they had already won agreements to significantly boost their pay: raises of nearly 20% over a three-year contract.
Chronic understaffing had left nurses in hospitals across the city with too many patients to properly care for all of them. That long-standing problem worsened as the virus thinned out the nursing workforce.
The 2023 contract propelled starting salaries at major Manhattan hospitals to about $120,000 in the last year. Many nurses make far more, with some hospitals paying nurses on average about $160,000, when overtime and years of experience are factored in.
By going on strike in 2023, the nurses locked in an agreement on nurse-to-patient ratios with enforcement mechanisms. When hospitals left units chronically understaffed, nurses could force administrators to pay them extra. Nurses in the Mount Sinai Health System were awarded $4.7 million from arbitrators in 2024 in nine understaffing cases.
Hospitals have chafed at those payments and sought to chip away at them. NewYork-Presbyterian went to federal court to appeal a similar arbitration ruling.
The nurses union said that the tentative agreements Monday will preserve the union’s ability to enforce staffing levels.
Observers were reluctant to declare either side a clear winner or loser.
“It sounds like a solid settlement,” Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said. “I’d be very hesitant to say one side won and the other side lost — it seems like a solid compromise.”
Many of the nurses lost several weeks’ pay. The hospitals had to hire short-term contract nurses and treated fewer patients than they would have otherwise. The raises that were agreed to are consistent with the raises that unions are generally achieving through collective bargaining, Katz said.