NEW YORK (AP) — New York City the nurses are on strike it was the third day on Wednesday that the two sides had seemingly gone for the long haul.
Negotiations do not appear to be on the table at this time with any of the three major hospital systems affected by the exit.
Nurse protesters also held a rally at a Bronx hospital on Wednesday, where their leaders targeted hospital administrators for mischaracterizing their contract demands.
Meanwhile, hospital systems say they are committed to keeping the travel nurses they brought in to fill job gaps at least through next week.
Here’s what you need to know about the biggest nurses’ strike the city experienced in decades:
About 15,000 nurses unionized under the New York State Nurses Association went on strike Monday morning at several campuses of three private, nonprofit hospital systems — Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian.
But hospital officials indicate that not all unionized nurses are keeping up: Mount Sinai says a growing number are choosing to keep working rather than join the patrol. The hospital said it dropped from 20% of nurses unionized on Tuesday to 23% on Wednesday.
Not every hospital operated by the three health systems is affected by the strike. Other private hospital systems in the city have also entered into tentative agreements with unions, preventing outages at their facilities. Municipal public hospitals are not affected by the strikes.
Nothing scheduled on Wednesday yet. The parties have not met since the Sunday before the strike.
Union members say they were scheduled to meet with representatives from one of the hospitals late Tuesday before administrators backed out at the last minute. Hospitals blamed the lack of communication on unions.
Each health center negotiates with the unions separately.
Nurses’ demands vary from hospital to hospital, but the union says members’ main concerns are health care, safe staffing and workplace violence.
They say emergency rooms in too many hospitals are overcrowded, their workloads have become unmanageable, and medical facilities need better security measures to keep patients and staff safe.
Erika Perrotta, an emergency room nurse at Montefiore, said at Wednesday’s rally that many emergency patients at the Bronx hospital are often left in the hallways because there are no rooms, making it difficult for nurses to move quickly through the area.
“This is unacceptable,” she told the crowd outside the hospital.
Phiona Hunnigan-McFarlane, a Montefiore nurse who also spoke at the rally, said she was punched to the ground by a distressed patient.
She said her injuries were so severe that she had to be cared for by her family while she was out of work for six months.
Hospitals say they are willing to give nurses a raise, but the union’s salary demands are simply too costly. They described them as “extreme” and “excessive”. Montefiore says the union’s proposal would raise the average nurse’s salary to $220,000 over three years, while Mount Sinai says it would raise it to nearly $250,000. Union nurse salaries currently average around $163,000 per year across the three systems.
Responding to security concerns raised at Wednesday’s rally, Montefiore said its security protocol is “best in class” and includes weapons detection systems, armed NYPD officers deployed 24 hours a day, internal hospital security staff and wearable panic buttons issued to nurses.
Montefiore also criticized the union’s proposal, which it says would prevent nurses from being fired even if they are found to be impaired on the job by drugs or alcohol.
Union officials fired back Wednesday, saying the hospital is “stigmatizing” those dealing with substance abuse issues while “blatantly mischaracterizing” a “non-controversial measure” already in place in the state.
The city management has not yet reported any problems in the first days of the trip.
Hospitals urged patients not to avoid care during the strike as they hired thousands of temporary contract nurses to cover the shifts of their regular nurses.
Mount Sinai said its emergency department was handling a 25% increase in patient registrations in the first days of the strike.
The Greater New York Hospital Association, an industry group, said hospitals canceled scheduled surgeries, moved patients from more specialized units and increased layoffs in the days leading up to the strike to become more efficient and reduce the number of patients they serve.
But the strike comes during a busy flu season. The city saw a spike in cases before the holidays, but has been declining since then.
The nurses left work for the last time in 2023. The attack hit Mount Sinai and Montefiore and lasted three days.
The result was an agreement to increase pay by 19% over three years at two hospital systems.
The pact also included provisions that address nurse staffing and workload, though the union says hospitals are trying to roll back those guarantees in current contract negotiations.
