Fifteen thousand nurses across ten campuses in New York City’s three biggest hospital systems are on an open-ended strike. It’s the city’s largest nurse strike in decades.
Picket lines stretched for blocks at Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and New York-Presbyterian hospitals on January 12, thronged with nurses plus Teamsters, hotel workers, and university staff showing solidarity.
At New York-Presbyterian, nurses in red hats blew whistles and waved clappers. The union’s printed signs read: “If nurses are outside, something is wrong inside!” Others scrawled on cardboard were more whimsical: “So bad even introverts are here!”
Solidarity was everywhere. When one nurse saw another without any red gear, she handed over her own union scarf: “You’re lucky! Everyone wants one of these.”
At the Mount Sinai picket line in Manhattan, union bus drivers and firefighters honked along Madison Avenue. Some nurses piled into their own cars for a spontaneous caravan that circled the block honking, revving engines, and waving clappers out windows in a festive cacophony. Even the cops standing akimbo cracked smiles. Music from saxophone and horns jazzed the crowd.
At Montefiore in the Bronx, hundreds of nurses rallied and played the song “No Scrubs” by R&B group TLC and chanted, “No contract, no scrubs!”
“Every single member here told us what they needed, we took it to the boss and the boss didn’t take it seriously,” bargaining committee member Rhonda Middleton-Roches, a nurse who works across a number of community clinics, said at a New York-Presbyterian picket. “We need the safe staffing. We need to feel safe in the workplace. We need our benefits so we can take care of our patients.
“This right here is us saying we need what we need to take care of this community.”
Three years ago, nurses bargained together at twelve hospitals but only ended up striking at two of the city’s big three hospital systems, Montefiore and Mount Sinai; 7,000 nurses…
Auteur: Luis Feliz Leon
