NEW YORK (AP) — Nurses at two of New York City’s largest hospitals were expected to strike Monday over a pay and staffing dispute, following a weekend of negotiations that failed to agree on a new contract.
The strike, which was scheduled to begin at 6 a.m., reportedly affected up to 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
The New York State Nurses Association said it was forced to take the drastic measure because chronic understaffing meant its affiliates were seeing too many patients.
“Nurses don’t want to go on strike. The leaders forced us to go on strike by refusing to seriously consider our proposals to address the desperate crisis of unsafe staff, which harms our patients,” the union said in a statement on Sunday.
In preparation for a strike, hospitals were transferring patients, rerouting ambulances to other centers, postponing non-urgent medical procedures, and arranging temporary hires.
State Governor Kathy Hochul on Sunday evening urged the union and hospitals to submit their dispute to binding arbitration.
Montefiore’s management said in a statement it was willing to allow arbitration to terminate the contract “as a means of achieving an equitable outcome.”
The union initially did not accept the proposal. In a statement, she said that Hochul, who is a Democrat, “must listen to the nursing heroes of COVID and respect our federally protected work and collective bargaining rights.”
Montefiore and Monte Sinai are the latest grouping of hospitals with union contracts expiring simultaneously. The Nurses Association had initially warned that it would hit them all at once, a possible calamity even in a city with as many hospitals as New York.
But one by one, the other hospitals reached agreements with the union as the deadline approached.
Nurses at Presbyterian Hospital-New York ratified on Saturday a deal that would give them raises of 7%, 6% and 5% over the next three years, as well as increase the workforce. That deal, which affects 4,000 nurses, has been seen as a model for negotiating with other hospital networks.
Nurses at two centers in the Mount Sinai system also accepted contracts on a preliminary basis on Sunday. But negotiations were continuing at the system’s flagship hospital on Manhattan’s east side.
Mount Sinai management said in a statement that by prioritizing the staff-to-patient ratio, the union “ignores the progress we’ve made in attracting and hiring more new nurses, despite the global shortage of health care workers plaguing hospitals in the United States”. the whole country”.
If nurses go on strike, patients are likely to experience complications in medical services such as emergency room visits and childbirth care.
