I am one of the nearly 15,000 New York City nurses who went on the largest and longest nurse strike in New York City history. I work at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital in a surgical step-down unit and a medical surgical unit that sees a mix of patients with different needs. It can be a challenge to safely staff a mixed unit like this when patients need different levels of care. Hospital understaffing was the main reason I got involved in my union, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), several years ago.
I came to Mount Sinai Morningside in 2018, but I was a nurse long before then; first in the Philippines and then in Florida, where you can’t even say the word “union” or talk to your coworkers about forming a union without getting reprimanded. When Morningside nurses negotiated a contract in 2022, I gave my colleagues support by attending the open bargaining sessions on Zoom.
In that last contract, we won improved and enforceable safe-staffing standards. Nurses finally had the tools to hold our hospital accountable when they overloaded nurses with too many patients at a time, putting our patient’s safety at risk.
Last year, Morningside nurses won more than $1 million in pay for nurses who worked chronically understaffed on two different units. In two separate arbitration rulings, including one on the eve of our contract expiration, we used our contract to protect patient care and compensate nurses for being overworked. The neutral arbitrators looked at the evidence and ordered the hospital to recruit, hire, and staff more nurses to keep patients safe. That’s the kind of accountability that our hospital administrators tried to take away from us during this round of bargaining.
Some of the richest hospitals in the city worked together to stall, delay, and push us out on strike.
During this contract negotiation and strike, I was part of the executive committee and the negotiations committee at my hospital. Even though I had a front seat during…
Auteur: Shella Dominguez
