Some hospital reps say they anticipate the strike could last weeks.
Nearly 15,000 nurses are walking off the job at hospitals across Manhattan and the Bronx on Monday morning after contract talks with hospitals faltered over the weekend.
The New York State Nurses Association, making good on strike threats announced weeks ago, sent the first picket lines up before 6 a.m. outside the affected medical centers, which are operated by Montefiore Medical Center, Mount Sinai Health System and NewYork-Presbyterian.
Outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Harlem early Monday, striking nurses bundled up against the cold chanted "the nurses united will never be defeated" as they cheered on each other.
“I was on strike three years ago, and it sucks to be back outside, having to fight for health care, having to fight to protect my patients, having to fight to be protected myself,” said Donovan Carey, an emergency-room nurse at the hospital. He said “safe staffing” levels were needed to protect patients, and nurses are demanding metal detectors at each entrance to the hospital to help prevent shootings.
“Hospitals are to be places of healing, not of fear,” Carey said, noting nurses are also pressing for clearer policies around federal immigration agents’ access to hospitals.
NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said ahead of the walkout that nurses preferred to continue providing patient care, “but our bosses have given nurses no other option but to strike.”
Representatives of the affected hospital systems said they were prepared to continue serving the public during the job action, which had long been threatened. A spokesperson for Montefiore said on Sunday that he anticipated this strike could last weeks. And Dr. Brendan Carr, CEO of Mount Sinai Health System, shared a similarly bleak outlook in a memo to employees Sunday afternoon.
“The planning and personnel costs required to responsibly run our hospitals for what we anticipate could be a long strike are substantial, but we are prepared to maintain these operations,” Carr said.
Blog Editor's Note:
Health institutions and workers have notably shifted away from the usual capitalist imperialist colonialist approach to recovery systems. The run of the mill enslavement based market institutional approaches to health is clearly incompatible with current scientific approaches and methodologies.
Simply put; running a slave trade and trying to take care of others is scientifically a no-go (13th amendment clause which keeps the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade running covertly).
Not fixin this structural issue would make that workplace extremely difficult to even operate in. The level of power abuse because of these factors is sensed. I'm with all the workers who have to endure this, and I hope that we could repair and apply these simple facts. Please support the health workers any way you can. Even as we progress to more encompassing systems without the necessity of racist, classist, white supremacist extremism and their imperialist colonial market to get the work done.
