Overview:
Thousands of nurses launched a strike from 10 private New York City hospitals Monday after contract negotiations stalled, marking one of the largest nurse strikes in state history. Haitian and Caribbean nurses are among those demanding safer staffing levels, protections from workplace violence to better serve patients.
NEW YORK — Thousands of nurses, many of them of Haitian descent, went on strike Monday following stalled contract negotiations between the New York State Nurses Association and 10 private hospitals.
“Our key sticking points in negotiations continue to be safe staffing for our patients, protection from workplace violence and health care for frontline nurses,” said Nancy Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association, during a press conference kicking off the planned strike.
She was flanked by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, among numerous officials, who came to show support for the strike from three of the city’s largest health care systems: Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian. The strike continued Tuesday, with no confirmed information about when it might end.
Ramatulah Sow, a nurse who has worked at NewYork-Presbyterian for 17 years, was among the demonstrators outside the hospital headquarters in Washington Heights.
“I’m here for a fair contract, for my patients, for my pension, for everything,” Sow said.
Hagans, who is Haitian American, leads a union that represents a workforce comprising a significant number of immigrants, many from Haiti and the Caribbean. While there is no exact data on how many nurses in New York City are Haitian or of Haitian descent, national and state data show that Haitian and Caribbean immigrants make up a significant share of the health care workforce.
The Migration Policy Institute stated in a 2023 report that more than 103,000 Haitian immigrants worked in health care nationwide as of 2021. The figure makes Haitians the sixth-largest immigrant group in that field in the U.S. Many work in nursing-related and health care support roles such as nursing assistants or home health aides. In the state of New York, immigrants account for about 37% of the health care workforce, roughly twice the national average.
City Council member Mercedes Narcisse, a nurse who is also Haitian American, chairs the body’s Hospitals Committee. She joined the call for improved working conditions.
“Nurses belong at the bedside, not on a picket line fighting for what they should be given,” Narcisse said in a statement. “My fellow nurses deserve a fair contract that reflects the work they do every day and the care they provide to our communities.”
Management for NewYork-Presbyterian said in a statement reported by THE CITY that they had offered significant wage increases and new measures to maintain safe staffing and workplace safety.
Voices raised amid conditions decline
From the chilly winter morning into the late afternoon Monday, the demonstrators chanted “Nurses are outside, something’s wrong inside” and various slogans. Amplified by a vocalist playing drums and accompanied by an electric guitarist and people on horns, they belted out the classic protest such as, “We’re fired up, can’t take no more.”
From inside the hospital, a surgeon donated coffee and donuts as the afternoon sun dipped and nurses’ voices became hoarse.
Sow, who moved to New York in 1998 from Liberia, has lamented a decline in conditions for nursing professionals.
“They don’t want to give us a fair contract. They don’t want to give us safe staffing,” said Sow, a nurse for 22 years.
“They don’t care for the patients, and we have to fight for safe staffing, for our pension and for our health care,” she said.
The walkout echoes similar strikes in recent years. In 2023, nurses staged strikes at Mount Sinai in Manhattan and Montefiore in the Bronx, also citing staffing shortages and unsafe conditions.
But NewYork-Presbyterian’s Columbia University Irving Medical Center, often called Columbia Presbyterian, had not seen a strike since the 1990s, according to Jennie Osborne, a nurse who has worked at the hospital on and off since 2005.
Holding a sign referencing the pandemic — “Remember Covid-19? Where are your pots and pans now?” — Osborne said the hospital once took pride in caring for its workers.
“This hospital used to be, when we say ‘amazing,’ it really was,” she said, referring to the slogan “Stay Amazing” displayed on signage outside the building. “We were treated like kings and queens as employees.”
Now, she said, hospital management seems to prefer to slash employee health benefits and refuses to strengthen workplace safety protections, including metal detectors and contract language that safeguards sick leave when workers are injured on the job.
That critical demand comes as hospitals are seeing more violence. Just four days before the walkout, a patient allegedly went on a violent attack at New York-Presbyterian’s Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
“What we’re asking for, mainly, is health insurance,” Osborne said. “When we’re injured, we don’t want to have to use our own sick time for that injury because it’s a workplace-related injury.”
If a nurse has no sick time available, Osborne said, that person is forced to take unpaid leave or begin the process of filing for disability.
“They’re forced to either not get paid while they’re out,” she said, “or they have to go and start filing for disability.”
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