NEW YORK (PIX11) — Monday began the fourth week of the largest nurses’ strike in New York City’s history.
Hundreds of nurses marked that milestone by marching to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office for a protest in which they both criticized New York State’s chief executive and called on her to do more to help bring the labor dispute to a close.
Their presence was quite a sight: a sea of hats, scarves, and coats, all in red — the color of the nurses’ union. They filled the main floor of Grand Central Terminal late Monday morning, and from there moved en masse across Manhattan and uptown more than a dozen blocks to the governor’s Manhattan office.
Chanting, carrying signs, playing noisemakers, and blowing whistles, the nurses marched to send the governor a message.
“I’ve been a nurse for 47 years,” said Carol McGowan, who said that nurses at Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, and Montefiore were being unappreciated, and that their patients were being put in danger.
“I am ready to fight,” she continued. “And I’ll continue to fight.”
Once they finished their quarter-mile march, the nurses filled the plaza in front of the governor’s office building, as well as much of the block across the street.
Speaker after speaker, through a bullhorn, criticized Hochul for the executive order she’d signed before the strike was declared that allowed traveling nurses to come to New York to fill in for some of the nearly 15,000 nurses who walked out.
On Monday, outside of Hochul’s office, nurses said that the governor’s order had allowed the labor dispute to wear on, against them.
The hospitals have reported spending more than $100 million to pay and house the traveling nurses.
Hilda Haynes-Lewis, a nurse practitioner, said that the hospitals’ actions were wrong during the strike and that in the months and years leading up to it, the hospitals had put patients’ health in danger.
She said that at her facility, Montefiore, she almost daily has to care for sick patients who are placed in beds in hallways, because there aren’t enough rooms for them. She said that over the years, too many patient rooms have been converted to offices, at the expense of patient care.
“I have been at Montefiore for 35 years,” she said, adding that conditions have deteriorated over that course of time. To get them to improve, said Haynes-Lewis, it’s been worth going on strike.
“That’s why I walked 15 blocks” to get to the governor’s office, she said. “It’s why I haven’t been paid in weeks.”
Unlike Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and dozens of other federal, state, and local elected officials, Hochul has never been to the nurses’ picket lines.
The nurses said that shows Hochul isn’t committed to them, or to the reasons they’ve said they’ve had to walk out: for better on-site safety at their hospitals; higher numbers of nurses per shift; no reduction in their health insurance benefits; and higher pay.
Over the weekend, the two sides met for negotiations. In a joint statement from the hospitals, they said, in part, that they’d offered “a fair, reasonable, and responsible economic proposal that provides annual wage increases and continues generous healthcare and pension benefits, under an economic structure that works for all of the parties…”
Then, on Monday, Mount Sinai CEO Brendan Carr said in a statement that spoke in greater detail about interaction with the New York State Nurses Association, or NYSNA, the nurses union. Carr’s statement said, in part: “NYSNA responded to our most recent offer, and we rapidly provided a counteroffer. It is my belief that both sides of the table are looking past their frustration to find a path forward, and I hope there will be a lot more activity this week.”
The two sides met at the Jacob Javits Center for further talks on Monday afternoon into Monday evening.
