NYC Nurses Strike: Who’s Really Being ‘Unreasonable?’
New York City nurses working at Mt. Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, and Montefiore facilities remain on strike this week with “a near-term path to an agreement” being “very unlikely.” Photo courtesy of Michelle Keller
By Joe Maniscalco
The ongoing nurses strike may be the largest in New York City history, but there’s nothing unprecedented about the way the hospital bosses at Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, and Montefiore are responding to their unionized workforce’s essential demands.
New Yorkers have already been told that the salary increases nurses are seeking are “unreasonable” and “ignore the economic realities of healthcare in New York City and the country.”
Of course, the salary boost spread out over three years that nurses living in the most expensive city in the country are seeking isn’t the only reason they’re striking.
New York City nurses are also striking against management’s ongoing campaign to roll back the safe staffing standards achieved in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as management’s attempts to diminish their healthcare coverage—although management claims that’s not what they’re doing.
“Honestly, it causes a lot of anxiety and strife,” 39-year-old Mount Sinai Emergency Room Tristan Castillo told Work-Bites ahead of the now two-week-old strike. “It's very stressful. I mean, we can think critically but at the same time, going home in the back of our heads it’s always, ‘Did we do everything right? Did we get [patients] the medication that we needed to get them on time?’ It's going home with that guilt of not knowing if we served our patients the best way we could during our shifts [that’s stressful].”
On Monday, Mt. Sinai CEO Brendan Carr issued a statement as part of his folksy “Carr Talk” column claiming that despite management’s best efforts “a near-term path to an agreement is very unlikely.”
Carr, according to published reports, commanded a nearly $5.5 million compensation package in 2024. That means there is and never can be anything remotely "folksy” about a guy pulling down that kind of cash.
And he’s definitely not alone. Both New York-Presbyterian and Montefiore pay their very important executives tens of millions of dollars, too. Somehow, however, there’s nothing “unreasonable” or unrealistic about those obscene salaries being awarded given the “economic realities of healthcare in New York City and the country.”
There never are.
Say what now? Hospital execs are trying to claim that the salary demands of striking New York City nurses are “unreasonable” and “unrealistic.”
Make no mistake, the hospital bosses would be singing the same tune no matter what was going on in New York City or across the country. Just like they’d be attempting to vilify the New York State Nurses Association [NYSNA] and turn workers against it no matter what hospital employees were demanding.
“Over the weekend,” Carr continues in his latest strike missive, “our operational teams extended our plans to run the Health System without the support of the nurses NYSNA leadership has convinced to strike.”
See what he attempted to do there? I dunno why Carr is making so much money because he’s using the exact same playbook every other anti-union and anti-worker boss uses in these kinds of situations. Carr could be running an auto repair body shop and he’d still be trying to paint the union as some kind of separate entity cynically inserting itself between benevolent managers and their dumb but happy field hands.
“Hospitals have characterized our demands as ‘unreasonable’”, NYSNA said in a statement issued over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend. “If you think maintaining healthcare benefits for your healthcare workers, providing enough staff so that patients can be safely cared for, and providing protections against workplace violence is unreasonable, then sure we’re unreasonable. What we are demanding, we believe, is essential to providing care to New Yorkers.”
What is unreasonable, according to NYSNA, is outgoing New York-Presbyterian CEO Steve Corwin making $26.3 million and Montefiore CEO Phil Ozuah making nearly $17 million given the “economic realities of healthcare in New York City and the country.”
We shall see what New Yorkers think is unreasonable as this strike continues.