In Six-Week Strike, Nurses Resisted NYSNA Tops’ Betrayals

NYC Nurses Strike Knifed by
Democratic Governor Hochul

  In the New York City nurses strike at three major hospital systems, the largest and longest in NYC history, the membership stayed solid to the end, but the leadership tried to play ball with the Democratic governor who issued executive orders to let out-of-state strikebreaking nurses to work without a New York state license. (Photo: James Estrin / The New York Times)

On January 12, more than 15,000 New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) members launched the largest nurses strike in New York City’s history. It also became the longest, as the strikers held out on the picket lines for over a month in the dead of winter, amid heavy snow and the coldest stretch NYC has seen in four decades. They struck against the top three private “non-profit” hospitals in the city, Mount Sinai, Montefiore and New York-Presbyterian/Columbia. In mid-February the union settled with Sinai and Montefiore. At Presbyterian, NYSNA tops tried to ram through a tentative agreement (TA), proposed by a mediator, over the opposition of the unit’s executive committee, but nurses voted it down by a whopping 3,099 to 867. So 4,200 “Presby” nurses stayed out for another two weeks until ratifying a new contract on February 21.

Key issues for Sinai and “Monte” nurses were maintaining enforceable safe staffing ratios, layoff protections and full health care won in a three-day strike in 2023, all of which the hospital managements sought to undercut. But Presbyterian, which settled without a strike in ’23, had weaker contractual enforcement language, and it laid off 1,000 nurses and other healthcare workers last year. Under the old contract, Presby nurses won $675,000 in arbitration awards for the hospital’s short-staffing, but the bosses refused to pay up, and hard-lined it against NYSNA’s demands. Staffing issues have been at the center of nurses’ struggles across the country, as a key way “non-profit” hospitals make money is by overburdening nurses with too many patients to attend. Thus the striking nurses’ demands were also key to patients’ well-being, and saving lives.

The NYSNA strikers with their red beanies and scarves had tons of public support. Everyone remembered the nurses as well as doctors and other hospital workers as heroes who risked their lives to save people during the COVID-19 pandemic. For our part, the Internationalist Group and CUNY Internationalist Clubs were on the lines almost daily, with signs saying “Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross.” And when the Presbyterian nurses dug in their clogs and refused to accept the sellout “deal” that NYSNA leaders were trying to foist on them, Internationalists were there calling for “All Labor Must Support Presby Nurses” and “NYSNA: Don’t Go Back Until Presbyterian Settles.” Other signs read, “NYSNA Strikers Knifed by Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!” and “Put Hochul’s Scab-Herding Order in the Toxic Waste!”

NYSNA nurses outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital celebrating settlement after holding out on the picket lines for six weeks in the dead of winter.  (Photo: Hiroko Maisuke / The New York Times)

The latter referred to Democratic New York state governor Kathy Hochul’s Executive Order No. 56, issued on January 9, and renewed repeatedly over the course of the strike, declaring a “disaster emergency” to allow the hospital bosses to bring in nurses and other health care workers from other states and Canada to work in NYC without New York State licenses. The hospital administrators, media and even NYSNA refer to them politely as “traveling nurses,” but they are strikebreakers. According to the New York Times (10 February), the hospitals spent over $100 million on these scabs supplied by Hochul. Without her scab-herding order, the hospitals would have had to drastically curtail operations. And when Presby nurses refused to give in and continued striking, Democrat Hochul renewed the order again.

New York-Presbyterian/Columbia is the richest hospital system in New York State, with assets of over $14 billion in 2024. It is the top private “non-profit” hospital in the country in money-making from medical services, raking in $9.3 billion in net patient revenue in the most recent 12-month period. It’s also No. 1 in the number of discharges, pushing patients out more quickly than others. Presbyterian is under investigation for colluding with insurance companies to keep prices high for common procedures. The investigation was demanded by SEIU Local 32JB, whose members needing medical care were steered to Presbyterian by insurance companies instead of to lower-cost hospitals. And it doles out hefty pay packages to its top execs: Presbyterian CEO Steve Corwin made a cool $26.3 million in compensation last year.

The bottom line is that, while hospitals are under financial pressure with Trump’s slashing of Medicaid funds, the nurses were battling huge capitalist corporations with deep pockets. “Non-profit” hospitals supposedly don’t have profits, but they do have “operating surplus” revenue, a lot of it. Many also own profit-making auxiliaries (laundry, cafeteria, parking), as well as profit-making foreign operations, and they dedicate much of their income to paying off bondholders, who profit handsomely with a steady cash flow by financing new buildings and mergers, gobbling up smaller hospital systems (Kaiser Family Foundation, “Why Many Nonprofit (Wink, Wink) Hospitals Are Rolling in Money,” 29 July 2024).

The NYSNA strike was an important battle for the entire labor movement. As one nurse told us, “In this political climate they think they can get away with anything. This isn’t just a nurses’ strike, it’s a fight for unions everywhere.” Facing the hard-nosed Presbyterian bosses, one striker said, “If we give up on staffing, maybe next time around they’ll try to hire non-union nurses.” Cutting off health benefits at the beginning of February, the hospitals cynically hoped to stampede strikers back to work. After Presby nurses voted down the TA that NYSNA tops tried to push on them, Presbyterian barraged them with texts and emails urging them to cross the picket lines. But the flood of scabs the bosses hoped for did not happen, with only a trickle going back. The strikers stayed admirably solid throughout.

Having been caught flat-footed by the brief 2023 strike at Mount Sinai and Montefiore, this time around the hospital managements were determined to grind strikers down. At all three hospitals, NYSNA managed to beat back outrageous takeback demands. The bosses eventually dropped demands for cuts to the nurses’ health care. They also reportedly backed off on threats to force nurses to follow AI instructions. But the union’s initial demand for raises totaling 30% over three years was cut down to only 12%, which may end up a pay cut after inflation. And as some ruefully pointed out, after weeks on the picket line, strikers had already lost more money than the supposed pay hike would bring. Moreover, three Mount Sinai nurses who were fired at the start of the strike, for supposedly “hiding” supplies from scabs, were not rehired.

An important issue raised by NYSNA during the strike was for protection of patients and staff against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) police and other immigration agents. After Veterans Administration hospital nurse and union member Alex Pretti was murdered by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on January 24, NYSNA strikers gathered on picket lines and outside the Manhattan VA hospital in his memory and to demand an end to ICE terror. The Health Care Workers Working Group of the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants (LCDI) put out a leaflet calling for the unions to officially declare Pretti a hero and calling to intensify the struggle. demanding: “No ICE/Border Patrol/DHS in hospitals or any health care facilities!”

In negotiations at one of the hospitals the union raised a series of demands, including that judicial warrants be required for immigration agents to enter; training for employees on how to handle ICE; protections for employees who stand up for patients; protection for employees who are immigrants or have Temporary Protected Status; extensive signage with Know Your Rights information; and a public statement that the hospital welcomes immigrant patients. But the hospitals adamantly refused to consider this, saying it was not a “germane” issue of working conditions. In announcing the end of the strike, NYSNA declared that the settlement would “Protect immigrant patients and nurses.” Not really – all that amounted to was the hospitals writing up their policy of how to handle ICE.

The previous (2023) contracts established committees to review staffing levels, with specific standards set for different departments. Yet within a year, NYSNA won more than $2 million in arbitration awards from Mount Sinai alone for understaffing violations: the hospitals prefer to pay more, like extra overtime, than actually reduce the workloads. Under the Memorandum of Agreement with Montefiore, which is now public, there are some improved nurse-patient staffing ratios and a number of nurses are to be hired in various units. At Presbyterian, the contract reportedly calls for hiring 78 full-time equivalents over three years, a tiny amount in a hospital with 4.000 nurses. But as these “non-profits” (in name only) operate as capitalist enterprises, they will always counterpose “efficiency” to ensuring quality patient care. The fight will go on.

None of this amounts to a victory, much less a “historic” one, as the NYSNA leadership claimed. Despite the betrayals of the union misleaders, at best one could say that, due to the members’ militancy and determination, they managed to stave off what could have been a major defeat. But for six weeks on the picket line, the nurses should have won far more. They didn’t because, first, the strike didn’t shut down the hospitals’ operations, and second, the NYSNA tops sought to work in tandem with the Democratic Party politicians who run both the city and state governments, and who were working against the strike. Instead of mounting a mainly defensive strike, NYSNA should have demanded union control of nursing staffing, And they should have run the scabs out.

Members of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs attended picket lines almost daily  in solidarity with the striking nurses,. Shown here calling on the union as a whole to stay out until Presbyterian settled, and pointing to the scab-herding role of the Democratic Party.  (Internationalist Photo)

A major problem in this and every other nurses strike, is that the hospitals keep functioning. Class-struggle unionists must fight to stop all scabs and scab operations. How? By NYC labor going all-out to form picket lines so big and militant that no one dares cross. To that end, there should be a fight for a single union of all health care workers, with appropriate representation of the different categories. In a strike, the union should decide what limited emergency care is permitted, and shut the rest down. Overall, to ensure adequate numbers of nurses and other personnel, to make hospitals off-limits to the immigrant snatchers, to ensure maximum safety in emergency conditions (as in the COVID pandemic), class-conscious unionists should fight for workers control of the hospitals, led by medical professionals.¹

To raise such a fighting program requires a fundamental change of leadership in health care unions. NYSNA president Nancy Hagans, in pushing to end the strike on the mediator’s terms, sent a video message to nurses in which NYSNA executive director Pat Kane declared, “The simple fact is that we’ve reached the end of negotiations.” But when the Presbyterian executive committee angrily denounced the rotten deal and the members overwhelmingly voted it down, 1,500 nurses quickly signed a petition demanding that the union investigate and discipline Hagans and Kane for bypassing the bargaining committee. A delegation of 50 nurses marched and delivered the petition to union headquarters. A reckoning is coming in NYSNA, but to form a solid leadership capable of successfully waging hard class struggle will require a political fight.

Central to that is the question of the Democratic Party. On February 2, hundreds of angry nurses marched to Democratic governor Hochul’s Manhattan offices to protest her scab-herding executive order. According to an interview with NYSNA executive board member from Montefiore, Michelle Gonzalez, published on the social-democratic site Jacobin (5 March), that march “had no involvement from NYSNA’s upper leadership. They did not want us to do things that were going to put Hochul in a bad light.” NYSNA president Hagans was tight with Hochul, and was herself a delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention. She certainly felt pressure from Hochul to end the strike. One nurse said of the NYSNA main leadership, “they’re probably trying to get a spot in (Hochul’s) administration.”

So Hochul is a “centrist” (i.e., overtly pro-business) Democrat. Meanwhile, New York City’s “progressive” Democratic mayor Zohran Mamdani stopped by the strike for some grandstanding, joining the picket line on January 20. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America (DSA) was accompanied by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020 (and then endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden). Despite their phony “socialist” rhetoric, both Mamdani and Sanders are bourgeois politicians. Mamdani then endorsed Hochul for reelection, in the middle of the NYSNA strike she was doing her best to break. Both pushed to end the strike.

DSAer Mamdani was showing that he is a loyal administrator of the capitalist order. He is, after all, the boss of the NYC police who arrested 13 NYSNA strikers protesting at the hospital bosses’ lair at the Greater New York Hospital Association on February 5. While the left-talking mayor is enormously popular (63% in a Siena poll, more even than when he was elected), the role of Mamdani and DSA Democrats everywhere is to sucker activists, young people, people who hate the white supremacist in the White House, etc., back into the deeply discredited party that supplied the bombs and planes for the U.S./Israel genocide in Gaza, that deported millions of people, far more than the current MAGA Republican administration, in short, the party that paved the way for Donald (“I’m a dictator”) Trump.

To break the stranglehold of the Democratic Party, that elephants’ graveyard where social movements go to die, we need to expose its real role, including the Democrats’ scab-herding in the New York City nurses strike of 2026. That’s right up there with Biden pushing strikebreaking legislation through Congress in 2022 (aided by DSA “Squad” leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) to block railroad workers from striking for sick days in their contract. However much they feud, Democrats and Republicans are both parties of Wall Street and the Pentagon. The Internationalist Group calls to break with the Democrats and build a class-struggle workers party. Expropriate the hospitals, pharmaceutical and insurance companies and replace profit-driven health care with socialized medicine under a workers government. Free, quality health care for all!  ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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