7,000 nurses went on strike on January 9 at two of New York’s largest private hospitals: Montefiore and Mount Sinai. And they have won.
calling themselves “exhausted and burned” Due to a lack of staff and since their collective agreement expired on December 31, the nurses held massive and aggressive pickets in front of the hospitals, with signs reading “On strike for better patient care”. And after three days, they have won. Nancy Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association, said her organization won a “historic victory.”
“Truly terrible conditions”
Michelle González, an intensive care nurse at Montefiore Hospital, has said: “The strike was for our patients. Nurses and health workers in general work in truly terrible conditions. We have too many patients that need to be cared for or too many very, very sick patients assigned to us. That is why we had to make the decision to go on strike.”
The strike had three objectives, aimed at maintaining a stable nursing staff and in adequate numbers to protect the health of patients. First, establish sufficient staffing levels. Second, establish a relationship between nursing schools and hospitals to attract nurses. Third, provide adequate wages to retain nurses. In the two hospitals that went on strike, the nurses have won on all three points.
At ten major private hospitals in New York City, nurses filed strike notices for January 9, despite union leadership hoping to avoid a strike and discouraged nurses from walking out. With union leadership pushing for an agreement, nurses at eight hospitals voted to sign the contracts, but nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai refused and went on strike to win patient-care staffing ratios they can be applied, and they have succeeded. Under the agreement reached at these two hospitals, their management will be penalized if they fail to maintain staffing levels. If management does not hire enough nurses, the salary that would have been paid to the missing nurses will be divided among the other nurses and paid within two months, while patients will benefit from a 15% reduction in their payments . This is an unprecedented and historic move.
On the front line of the fights
“This was a phenomenal victory for us as nurses.,” stated Michelle Gonzalez. “When we took to the streets, we told the general directors of the hospitals that we were not going to continue working in these conditions. We will continue fighting for better conditions for ourselves and for our patients. ”
Nurses have not only gained at minimum staffing levels, but also pay increases of 19.2%. In addition, the hospitals have agreed to fill vacancies, provide staff with fully-funded healthcare and lifetime medical coverage for retirees, provide educational benefits, and increase payments to pension funds.
Today, health is, after education, the second most important activity in the US There are 22 million health workers, or 14% of all wage earners, seven million are hospital workers and two million of them are registered nurses. Unlike many other jobs and professions, 85% of nurses are women and tend to reflect the ethnic diversity of the country, with white, black, Latino and Asian nurses working and, if necessary, going on strike together.
Unions represent 20% of all nurses and recently there have been many strikes in hospitals across the country. In the three years of the Covid 19 pandemic, hundreds of nurses have lost their lives and burnout has driven thousands to leave the profession. Just last year, six unions representing 32,000 people went on strike at various hospitals across the United States. They did it with great sympathy from the public, who saw nurses as heroines.
In the 1970s, a time of union agitation, socialist groups sent their members into heavy industry (steel, cars, mining and trucking), but today the priorities are different. A group called Rank-and-File Project encourages left-wing militants to become teachers and nurses, as well as maintenance workers and UPS drivers. Their goal is to organize grassroots workers and strengthen the labor movement while recruiting workers for socialism.
Dan La Botz, professor, truck driver, historian and journalist, is the author, among others, of What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Brill, Leiden 2016 (What has gone wrong. The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis) and Haymarket Books, Chicago 2018. He was a co-founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). A member of the socialist organization Solidarity (a sympathetic section of the Fourth International in the United States), he is also a member of the Brooklyn branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
https://lanticapitaliste.org/actualite/international/etats-unis-new-york-des-milliers-dinfirmieres-ont-fait-greve-et-ont-gagne
19/01/2023
Translation: South wind
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