How NYC Nurses Won After Their Longest Strike in the City’s History

Maximillian Alvarez: We’ve got another urgent strike update episode for y’all today on a critical health care workers strike: the longest sustained strike in the history of New York City. As Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Ben Fractenberg report in The City:

“NewYork-Presbyterian nurses rejected a tentative agreement by an overwhelming margin Wednesday, voting to extend their strike — now 31 days running — against the hospital system.

Their union, the New York State Nurses Association, said the unfair labor practice strike and bargaining will continue. Out of approximately 4,200 NewYork-Presbyterian nurses who were eligible to cast ballots, 3,099 voted to reject the deal and 867 voted to approve it.

At Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Morningside and West, and Montefiore, nurses voted to approve their contracts Wednesday evening by margin of 87%, 96%, and 85% respectively and will return to work this weekend.

A NewYork-Presbyterian spokesperson said the hospital was ​“disappointed that our nurses did not ratify the mediator’s proposal, which we accepted on Feb. 8 and NYSNA leadership endorsed.” The spokesperson, Angela Karafazli, said the hospital is willing to honor the rejected proposal for reconsideration.

Nancy Hagans, the president of NYSNA, called on the hospital to ​“agree to a fair contract and bring all of our nurses back to work.

Nurses at the three hospital systems have been on strike since Jan. 12 trying to secure stronger nurse-to-patient ratios, claiming that staffing shortages put their and their patients’ wellbeing at risk.

To break this all down, I am grateful to be joined on the show today by Beth Loudin. Beth, now that we know that listeners, at least, have that much information up top, please do step in and tell folks about anything that has been missed about this strike, where it started, how it’s evolved, and what is happening right now?

Beth Loudin: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. We’ll take it back to the very beginning. We’ve been bargaining since August, which is just absolutely insane at this point. Our contract expired December 31. Prior to expiration, we had been very clear that expiration was our deadline. We had done a strike authorization vote with our members, and we had the strongest authorization vote we ever had in probably the history of NYSNA, but definitely in the history of NYSNA at NYP, New York-Presbyterian. We had just record engagement and a solid 98% of nurses voted yes to authorize us to use a 10 day notice to go on strike if necessary, and it became exceedingly clear that it was going to be necessary, as even the basic things like health care and our pension had not been resolved by our deadline.

We were informed that our specific hospital, New York-Presbyterian… wanted to cut a lot of what we currently have in our insurance plans because they just said it’s too costly. So rather than engaging in a process about how we could do cost savings and any of those ways that they normally do at the trustee level, New York-Presbyterian tried to take it outside of the trustee level and demand cuts, cuts, cuts for healthcare for healthcare workers. 

Our hospital wanted to just give us a bucket of money to disperse nonstalled proposals instead of saying, let’s engage about your wage proposal, let’s engage about your differentials proposal, let’s engage about your health care, let’s engage about your pension. Because we know all of these things will go up with money, like the pension will go up, the healthcare, of course, just like everybody else’s plans, the cost is going up. So the process in which we were trying to get any of these issues resolved was very blocked by management doing this bucket proposal and also stalling on our healthcare benefits. 

We were presented with a mediator proposal that was put together… we already had four mediators involved, one at each of the tables that were negotiating actively. That was Mount Sinai-Main, Mount Sinai- Morningside-West, Montefiore and us, so four mediators were mediating between our tables and the boss, and then a fifth mediator came in and put together a large mediator proposal to address everything. To be clear, this proposal did have standard wages and standard health care, pension and a return to work plan for all the tables. And also, to be clear, we always wanted to be in alignment with our brothers and sisters across the city and stand in solidarity with 15,000 nurses. That had been our plan since day one, to stand strong together and fight together and use our collective power together. 

That being said, we were also still negotiating at four different tables. So within this mediator proposal, the other tables were a little bit ahead of us in terms of their boss moving on proposals. We had a lot of issues still outstanding. When we were given the proposal, there were two things lacking for us. One was staffing. They gave us some but it was not enough to meet what our minimum needs are. The second part was job security. If you were aware, last year, New York-Presbyterian decided, in advance of any of the federal funding cuts that were coming down, they decided to do a 2% layoff across the whole enterprise. This affected about 1000 NYSNA represented employees at our site here, and a lot of the targeting was at the nurse practitioner level, our advanced practice nurses. So we have that as a high priority in our contract fight this year, that we should be able to protect our jobs and protect especially advanced practice nurses from being replaced with other workers, as it had been done in the past three years. We had seen this was a goal of our boss for the past three years. As they started chipping away, they got rid of some of the pain nurse practitioners, and then they came for our beloved midwives, and said, oh, we don’t need that service anymore. But then a week later, opened up the service under Columbia University, so that New York-Presbyterian was not paying for it, but Columbia was. This was clear union busting from the past three years. That’s why it was a high priority for us. Those two items are the only two outstanding from the mediator proposal.

When we brought it to our membership on Sunday, we were very clear. These are the gaps. We’re going to push back on the mediator and say these are the gaps they need to fix. If they fix it, then we will recommend this proposal. They came back around midnight and said, no, that was not possible, so therefore our committee was not going to move forward with this proposal. 

We all agreed to the top portion that was a unified wages, pension, health care and return to work program. But the secondary parts that were hospital specific did not meet what we needed at New York-Presbyterian from the union. Since then, as quoted in the article, our NYSNA executives did put it to the membership to take a vote, and our membership stood with our local decision making.

So from there, we’re back to where we were on Sunday night, which is we should be continuing to bargain. We expect New York-Presbyterian to give us dates to meet us at the table so we can finish this contract. This has always been about getting a fair contract. We never wanted to go on strike. We miss our patients. Our patients miss us, we’ve heard that time and time again from the patients on the inside. We want to do our jobs. We love our jobs, but we can only return when our patients are being cared for safely through the language that we will get with more staffing and job security so that our specialized nurses can and nurse practitioners can stay at that bedside throughout the years. 

So where we’re at now is that we are planning next steps. We encourage anyone and everyone to put pressure on New York-Presbyterian to come to the table. They have threatened us that they won’t give us dates for weeks. We’re not going to stand for that. So please enact all of your networks. We do think our resolution is close. Our membership is excited for that to be completed and that we will have a strong contract going back into the hospital. It is very possible. New York-Presbyterian just has to come to the table.

Alvarez: The episode that we just published was an interview that I did with a panel of folks from UNAC, UHCP out on the West Coast. To listeners, that’s United Nurses Associations of California / Union of Healthcare Professionals. And they said a lot of really important and powerful things connecting what they were fighting for and going on strike and staying on strike for, and what y’all have been striking for, and also, the connections that have been building between healthcare workers across the country. How is this stuff connected and why are these demands that have not been resolved worth staying on strike for for you and your fellow union members? 

Loudin: I mean, it’s pretty clear that the hospitals themselves have been pretty well organized. They talk to each other. They’re always scheming about how to bust unions to keep workers down, to financially strap organizations while they become richer and richer at the top. Our struggle is the same, and our struggle is the same even in hospitals that don’t have unions that can protect them. So we hope that this is a wildfire. 

We’re strongly standing with our California and Hawaii brothers and sisters. We all are in the fight together. Any of the advancements that we achieve in our contract directly benefit anyone who enters our hospital. Our patients, their families.We know it benefits people to have nurses that are protected, nurses that want to stay on the job, and also enough nurses period. You need enough nurses so that you can stay alive and you can get well and get out of the hospital or the clinics here at NYC Presbyterian specifically. So there is a fight. 

I hope there’s many more that will pick up the fight and know that you can fight any pressure that comes towards you. Worker power can prevail. Organizing with your coworkers, organizing across facilities, we have really opened up the relationships between all of our nurses in the city, and then even over to California and Hawaii, new relationships are being formed through going through the struggle together. So it’s really been a beautiful, difficult, heartbreaking, all the emotions, period, but really the solidarity has been the best outcome of this strike so far.