Striking NYC Nurses Press the Fight Despite ‘PATCO’ Threat
Striking New York City nurses wearing their red NYSNA gear streamed over the Brooklyn Bridge on Tuesday morning in search of safe staffing and a new contract. Photos/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
New York City nurses marched into the fourth week of their historic strike Tuesday morning optimistic that they were finally close to a deal with management, but also roiling underneath the possible threat hospital bosses might “PATCO” the entire walkout and replace them all—permanently.
The threat of permanently replacing thousands of striking New York State Nurses Association [NYSNA] members began to circulate ahead of Monday’s march on Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan offices on Third Avenue where hundreds of union nurses lambasted the chief exec, in part, for issuing an executive order allowing out-of-state “travel nurses” to take over their jobs before the strike began on Jan. 12.
Hundreds of striking nurses marched over the Brooklyn Bridge on Tuesday morning on the way to City Hall Park where they continued to press the fight for safe staffing and a new contract—regardless of the purported “PATCO” threat.
“I think the intended reaction the bosses thought we would have was one of fear and intimidation,” Montefiore Hospital nurse practitioner Roxanna Garcia told Work-Bites as the red-clad marchers arrived at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn on Feb. 3. “But, honestly, our members are coming out even stronger—they are refusing to be bullied.”
Striking nurses begin to assemble at Cadman Plaza Park before marching across the Brooklyn Bridge on Feb. 3.
Former President Ronald Reagan infamously delivered a body blow to the American labor movement back in 1981 that trade unionists are still grappling with all these years later when he fired more than 11,000 striking PATCO [Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization] members and banned them for life.
According to Garcia, however, the “PATCO” threat has only “galvanized” striking nurses to “further understanding that our bosses are willing to potentially do an illegal action just to instill fear into our rank and file.”
“A win definitely goes beyond us nurses here in New York City,” Garcia continued. “It really sets a tone and a message to employers across the country that workers are going to stand up and fight for the things that are right.”
More than 30,000 Kaiser Permanents nurses and healthcare professions in California and Hawaii also walked off the job last week. Like NYSNA, the members of the United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals are striking to put an end to short-staffing and proposed reductions in worker wages and benefits.
Striking New York City nurses were resolute as they made their way to the Brooklyn Bridge this week.
“If we don’t persevere—if we don’t continue with this fight—the generation behind me is gonna suffer more,” a 59-year-old nurse working at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Mother-Baby Unit told Work-Bites on Tuesday. “What they really want to do is get rid of unions. And if we don’t fight what’s gonna happen to our children or grandchildren? People say don’t indulge politics in this—but it’s about politics.”
According to established A1 guidelines, nurses working at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Mother-Baby Unit should be caring for no more than three mother-baby couplets. But the nurses Work-Bites interviewed in Cadman Plaza Park this week said short-staffing means that one nurse could be responsible for as many as five couplets—or 10 patients in all.
“When we’re short-staffed we end up not caring for our patients effectively and efficiently because we are spread too thin,” a 36-year-old nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Mother-Baby Unit also told Work-Bites. “It’s unfortunate that management is doing what they’re doing to us. We’ve been with them for so many years and they’re basically stabbing us in the back. They know that the nurses are irreplaceable—but to go ahead and make those threats is disheartening.”
Sophie Dames, an RN working at a Mount Sinai Hospital Post-Acute Recovery Unit, told Work-Bites that NYSNA’s goal is to keep negotiations going no matter what.
“So far we are maintaining our healthcare,” she said. “We are talking about staffing. We need more nurses in the hospital. If we are a unit that needs 20 nurses, we need to have 20 nurses—not 9 nurses, not 10 nurses. When you are understaffed you are putting your patients in danger. That’s why everybody is here today—to protect our patients and to protect our communities.”
Shouldn’t Hurt To Be A Nurse: Striking nurses got plenty of support from passing motorists as they marched over the Brooklyn Bridge on Tuesday morning.
New York Presbyterian, Montefiore, and Mount Sinai hospital systems all lavish their executives with multi-million dollar compensation packages each year, and insist the average striking nurse roughly earns about $152,000 annually and is asking too much in pay raises.
A 30-year-old Mount Sinai nurse from Bay Ridge, however, told Work-Bites this week that management is inflating nurses’ actual salaries and that the initial raise management put on the table was a “net pay cut if we take a deal that makes us pay more into our [health] insurance.”
“We have to pay higher copays, we have to pay more into insurance…it would end up being a loss of revenue,” he said. “It’s very expensive to live here in the city; we can’t march backwards.”
The same nurse who requested anonymity, said he still hopes the outstanding issues can be successfully resolved without further impasse—and the strike can be settled in the next 24 to 48 hours.
“I have a lot of friends in different unions, and if the union doesn’t stand together, if it doesn’t fight, if we don’t remain strong together—it sets the tone,” he continued. “[The bosses] sell their playbook off to the next union-busting activity. It creates a race to the bottom situation where everybody is trying to break every union.”
Garcia, who lives in Jamaica, Queens and commutes an hour-and-a-half to and from work each day, said hospital executives claiming striking nurses are asking for too much money ought to look at themselves in the mirror.
Striking nurses cross the Brooklyn Bridge on the way to City Hall Park in Manhattan.
“Nurses are asking for what is called a ‘livable wage,” Garcia continued. “Affordability is not just a hot topic—it’s a lived reality for so many working class people and that includes nurses. New York City is expensive. Asking to have a decent salary that is more than just surviving is not being greedy.”
Garcia further said that Montefiore’s emergency rooms in the Bronx are chronically overcrowded—especially during cold and flu season with incoming patients routinely lining the hallways.
“But they don’t do that at other facelifts they have—for instance at White Plains,” she said. “They don’t invest in expanding and improving the facilities that we have at Montefiore, Moses and Weiler [campuses in the Bronx].”
A spokesperson for Mount Sinai Health System reached for comment on this story declined to address the “PATCO” threat, and instead issued a statement saying that “Both parties continued to make progress with the mediator to resolve the outstanding issues at the bargaining table.”
Last week, Mount Sinai Health System CEO Brendan Carr issued a statement saying, “We know that at some point this strike will come to an end, and I am thinking about how we repair and rebuild our culture.”
This week, many striking nurses angry about the “PATCO” threat are thinking much the same thing. But they’re also thinking about what the outcome of their strike might mean for the rest of working class people across the country, too.
“If we can win here and pull off something to prevent our bosses from trying to break our union apart, or at least weaken us—that, I think, is a positive for other unions across the country,” Garcia added.