Mayor Zohran Mamdani once again joined New York City nurses on the picket line Tuesday morning as they entered their ninth day of striking, this time flanked by fellow democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The mayor, who also visited nurses on the first day of the strike last Monday, made plain whose side he was on, even as he urged both nurses and hospitals to come together to quickly resolve.
“ This is about safe working conditions. This is about a fair contract. This is about dignity,” Mamdani said to nurses bundled up in bright red New York State Nurses Association hats and scarves.
Both nurses and hospital reps have signaled they are far apart as the strike entered its second week at medical centers run by Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian. Nurses resumed contract talks with all three hospitals in recent days after a long pause, with the most recent bargaining session held on Sunday with Montefiore. But union officials said Tuesday there was little progress toward reaching deals that would bring nurses back to work.
“One day longer, one day stronger!” nurses chanted on Tuesday, even after many of them had spent days on the picket line in the cold.
Brendan Carr, the CEO of Mount Sinai Health System, wrote in a message to employees Monday that the hospital system is settling into a “long-term cadence” with the temporary workers it has hired to fill in during the strike.
“To ensure ongoing high-quality care, we have made additional commitments to working with our agency nurses,” Carr wrote.
Both Mamdani and Sanders, who represents Vermont, called out the hospitals for spending money on the temporary workers — who, in some cases, are making nearly $10,000 a week — rather than on meeting nurses’ contract demands.
“ The people of this country are sick and tired of the greed in the health care industry,” Sanders said in his speech.
But hospital representatives continue to call nurses’ demands at the negotiating table unreasonable, saying the salary and benefit packages they’re asking for would strain their bottom lines as medical centers face down federal health care cuts in the coming years.
Nurses at the rally outside Mount Sinai West on Tuesday said they were prepared to hold out to get what they were asking for in terms of health benefits, staffing and other demands.
“It’s cold and we're still out here,” said Eleanor McIntyre, a nurse in the cardiac intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Morningside. “We're fighting for our patients, so we'll hold out as long as we need to.”
Some on the picket line also expressed skepticism that the hospitals were really running as smoothly as executives said they were without their regular nurses on hand.
“Even though a nurse is coming in who has travel experience, they don't have the specialized care [training] that we do,” said Daisy Ademola, a nurse who works in the neurosciences intensive care unit at Mount Sinai West.
Neither the hospitals nor the nurses’ union has shared when they will return to the negotiating table. A spokesperson for NewYork-Presbyterian said Monday the hospital system is working with a mediator to schedule the next bargaining session.
