‘I Feel Betrayed By Everyone’: Striking NYP Nurses Refuse to Give Up the Fight
Striking NYSNA members hold the line this weekend at NewYork-Presbyterian hospital. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
Striking NewYork-Presbyterian hospital nurses decisively voted down a tentative deal with management last week that many insist the heads of the New York State Nurses Association [NYSNA] should never have tried to advance—and this weekend many on the picket line were still feeling burned by their own union.
“I feel betrayed by everyone,” 25-year-old NewYork-Presbyterian hospital nurse Jade Greenfield told Work-Bites outside the Milstein Hospital Building in Washington Heights on Sunday. “I think the lack of communication was the most shocking.”
Greenfield and her fellow strikers have been holding down the picket line since Jan. 12. That’s when NYSNA kicked off the largest nurses strike in New York City history involving some 15,000 members at the Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and NewYork-Presbyterian private hospital chains.
Union leadership successfully sparked the ire of NewYork-Presbyterian’s rank and file members last week, however, when they decided to overrule the strikers’ executive committee and put a tentative contract agreement with hospital bosses to a vote that many insist failed to meet safe staffing demands.
Striking nurses on the picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian on Feb. 15 charge profit-driven hospital bosses with refusing to properly staff the hospital and keep nurses safe.
“We believe all striking nurses deserve to see the details of their tentative agreements and get the opportunity to vote on whether to ratify a new contract,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said on Feb. 10
NYSNA leaders had already declared victory and at least a partial end to the nearly month-old strike when one day prior they announced nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospital systems had reached tentative agreements with management, which were later ratified. Those members have since begun returning to work.
Despite those agreements, striking NewYork-Presbyterian hospital nurses insist their safe staffing demands have not been met. They rejected the proposed three-year contract put to them by a whopping 3,099–867 margin on Feb. 11. Roughly 4,000 remain on strike.
“We feel our executive committee people, with boots on the ground, have done an excellent job communicating with us, and making things available to us,” Greenfield continued on Sunday. “The leadership that doesn’t have boots on the ground, doesn’t know what we’re going through—to go make a decision over our heads that we then all disagreed with—was a little bit eye-opening to what their priorities are.”
Striking nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian are feeling undervalued and unsupported as their fight continues.
NYSNA leaders were scheduled to meet with NewYork-Presbyterian strikers on Monday in an effort to mend relations. But striking ICU nurse Na Li told Work-Bites on Sunday that the remaining strikers aren’t getting all the support they need.
“All of us have families to support. Some of our nurses are pregnant and still don’t have medical coverage,” she said. “I don’t think we’re getting the same level of support as before when all three of our hospitals were out. We barely see anybody from upper NYSNA leadership.”
NYSNA member Jaiver Grewal is a 25-year hospital veteran who’s spent 18 of those years working at NewYork-Presbyterian.
“I feel that whatever [union leadership] did was was probably, in their eyes, for the betterment of getting a contract,” he told Work-Bites on Sunday. “But they’re on our team. We’re a strong union. We all appreciate everybody focusing on NYP giving a fair contract. We’ve spoken to NYSNA leadership, and we’re working on mending those relationships and understanding their thinking. I love my union, I love my leadership, I just have to figure out what went wrong.”
Brass ___s? Striking NewYork-Presbyterian nurses demonstrate their mettle on the picket line this weekend.
Greenfield said NYSNA leadership has been “very supportive after the fact.”
“They have said, ‘no, we’re with you, we’ll back you.’ They’re still bringing us our hand-warmers and everything we’ve had to make sure we could still be out here safely and not as cold,” she said.
NewYork-Presbyterian hospital bosses, meanwhile, have yet to return to the bargaining table—and at the time of this writing it remains unclear when that might happen.
“It’s all about management not realizing that nursing has changed,” Grewal told Work-Bites. “The care of these patients is getting much higher. The acuity is increasing on the patients, patients are living longer, they are needing more nursing care. Back in the day, you could take your 10 patients. Now, things have changed totally—that’s the problem. The patient population has changed and management is not adapting to that.”
According to Greenfield, it’s no mystery why.
“It’s about money—it’s about big corporations wanting money. That’s all there is to it,” she told Work-Bites. “You can make it as complicated as you want, but there’s no nursing shortage. There are nurses out there. People are going to nursing school all the time—they’re just not hiring us because they don’t want to pay. There’s really not that much more to it than that.”
Despite agreements reached at Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospital systems, striking nurses and their supporters at NewYork-Presbyterian braved another frigid weekend on the picket line.
Before the strike, Greenfield also said that she and other nurses were working ridiculous amounts of overtime in an effort to support each other and to keep NewYork-Presbyterian properly staffed.
“A lot of us are thinking about what our next steps are gonna be after seeing how we’ve been treated by the corporation we trusted and chose to work for,” she said. “I think a lot of people are feeling like, ‘Why am I gonna work for someone who does’t value me?’ Nurses inherently want to support a good cause; we just want to help people. You always know there’s corporate greed—but you always hope there’s some humanity left. I don’t know how much humanity is left in this corporation.”
NewYork-Presbyterian has not responded to Work-Bites’ requests for comment.