Nurses go on strike at two major New York hospitals

NEW YORK (AP) — Striking nurses chanted and waved signs outside two major New York hospitals Monday after a weekend of negotiations over wages and staffing levels failed to reach an agreement on a new contract .

The layoffs affect up to 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Patients may see interruptions in care, such as emergency room visits and childbirth.

The New York State Nurses Association, which represents the workers, said it was forced to take the drastic step because of chronic understaffing that leaves them caring for too many patients.

The stunning nurses sang the chorus of Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” Monday morning in front of Mount Sinai on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“We were heroes just two years ago,” said Warren Urquhart, a nurse in the transplant and oncology units, referring to the height of the COVID-19 crisis. “I was on the front line in the city when everything stopped. And now we have to stop so that they understand how much we mean to this hospital and to the patients.”

Nurse Juliet Escalon said: “We were the so-called heroes – and now this is how you treat heroes?”

Union officials say nurses are struggling with staffing levels as much for their patients’ sake as for their own. Escalon said she sometimes cares for twice as many people as standards call for, skipping bathroom breaks to attend to patients.

“What we’re really fighting for here is patient safety,” he said. “How can I meet your needs when I’m on call with the rest of the patients?”

Fran Cartwright, Chief Nursing Officer at Mount Sinai, said she empathizes with overworked nurses and that the hospital needs time to rebuild its ranks after the coronavirus pandemic has caused disruptions and departures in nursing and many other professions.

Meanwhile, both hospitals planned to assign managers and others not represented by the union to cover the striking workers’ shifts.

Montefiore officials said in a statement Monday: “We remain committed to continued and compassionate assistance, recognizing that union leadership’s decision will cause fear and uncertainty in our community.”

Montefiore and Mount Sinai were preparing for an outage by transferring patients, rerouting ambulances to other facilities, postponing non-emergency medical procedures and arranging temporary staffing.

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Sunday asked the union and the hospitals to submit their dispute to binding arbitration.

Montefiore’s administration said it was willing to let an arbitrator terminate the contract “as a means of achieving an equitable outcome.”

The union did not immediately accept the proposal. In a statement, he said Hochul, a Democrat, “should listen to the health care heroes on the front lines of COVID and respect our federally protected labor and collective bargaining rights.”

Montefiore and Mount Sinai are the latest in a group of hospitals with union contracts expiring at the same time. The Nurses Association initially warned that it would hit everyone at once — a potential calamity even in a city with as many hospitals as New York.

But one by one, the other hospitals struck deals with the union as the deadline approached.

Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital ratified a deal Saturday that will give them raises of 7 percent, 6 percent and 5 percent over the next three years as it increases staffing levels. That agreement, which covers 4,000 nurses, was seen as a model for negotiations with other hospital systems.

Nurses at two facilities in the Mount Sinai system also accepted temporary contracts Sunday. But negotiations continued at the system’s flagship hospital on Manhattan’s East Side.

The Mount Sinai administration said in a statement that the union’s focus on the staff-to-patient ratio “ignores the progress we have made in attracting and hiring more new nurses despite the global health worker shortage affecting hospitals across the world”. the country”.