CNN New York –
A walkout of more than 7,000 nurses at two major New York City hospitals began at 6 a.m. Monday, after talks to avoid a strike broke down overnight.
Tentative agreements covering nurses at several hospitals have been reached in recent days, including two new agreements Sunday evening. But talks with Mount Sinai Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and three locations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx fell through overnight.
“After negotiations late last night at Montefiore Hospital and Mount Sinai, no tentative agreement was reached. Today, more than 7,000 nurses at two hospitals are on strike for fair contracts that improve patient care ” the New York State Nurses Association said in a statement Monday.
Both hospitals said Monday morning that efforts to reach an agreement were unsuccessful.
“NYSNA leaders walked away from negotiations shortly after 1:00 a.m. ET, refusing to accept the exact same 19.1 percent wage increase offer agreed to by eight other hospitals, including two other health system campuses of Mount Sinai, and ignoring the governor’s solution to avoid a strike,” Mount Sinai spokeswoman Lucia Lee said in a statement to CNN.
Montefiore said it was “a sad day for New York City.”
“Despite Montefiore’s offer of a compound salary increase of 19.1%, the same offer agreed to at our wealthier peer institutions, and the commitment to create more than 170 new nursing positions… the NYSNA leadership has decided to step away from their patients’ bedsides,” the medical center said in a statement.
But while the union has accepted the same raises at other hospitals, it said its main complaint at Mount Sinai and Montefiore is that nurses were overworked and facing burnout.
“We need management to come to the table and provide better staffing,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans said on a press call Sunday afternoon.
The union insists it is on strike to try to improve patient care.
“Going to the hospital to get the care you need is NOT crossing our picket line. Patients should seek hospital care immediately if they need it,” he said in the statement. “We’d rather be the ones providing that care, but our bosses have pushed us to be here.”
According to Hagans, Montefiore has 760 nursing vacancies, adding that “too often an emergency department nurse is responsible for 20 patients instead of the standard three patients.”
By Sunday evening, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had urged management and the union to agree to binding arbitration as a way to avoid a strike. Although the management of the two hospitals accepted the idea, the union did not.
“We will not give up our fight to ensure our patients have enough nurses at the bedside,” the union said in response to Hochul’s arbitration suggestion.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams had encouraged all sides Sunday night to “remain at the negotiating table for as long as it takes to reach a voluntary agreement.”
Hospitals have been preparing for a strike since the nurses’ union announced its plans 10 days ago. Affected hospitals plan to pay temporary “travel” nurses to fill in when possible and some had already begun transferring patients.
Montefiore issued a notice to staff, obtained by CNN, telling nurses how to leave the union and stay on the job if they wanted to keep caring for their patients.
Mount Sinai, which operates two hospitals that reached agreements Sunday evening in addition to the one still facing a strike, began moving babies to the neonatal intensive care unit late last week. Faced with the possibility of a strike, hospitals had already taken steps to postpone some elective procedures.
The union says hospitals will spend more to hire temporary nurses at a significantly higher cost. He argues that the hospitals should accept their demands to hire more staff and grant the raises the union is asking for.
“As nurses, our primary concern is patient safety,” Hagans said in a statement Friday. “However, nurses … have been forced to work understaffed, stretched to our breaking point, sometimes with one nurse in the Emergency Department responsible for 20 patients. This is not safe for the nurses or our patients.”
Hospitals say they are doing what they can to hire more nursing staff.
“Mount Sinai is appalled by NYSNA’s reckless actions,” Mount Sinai said in a statement Friday. “The union is jeopardizing patient care and forcing valued nurses at Mount Sinai to choose between their dedication to patient care and their own livelihoods.”
Nurses at the first hospital to reach a tentative agreement, New York-Presbyterian, ratified that agreement in a result announced by the union on Saturday. It was a close call with 57% of nurses voting yes and 43% against. The tentative agreements reached over the past few days still need to be ratified by union rank-and-file members before they can come into force.
Strikes have become more common across the country as tight labor markets and dissatisfaction with working conditions have led unionized employees to flex their muscles more often at the bargaining table.
There were 385 strikes in 2022, up 42% from 270 in 2021, according to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. The U.S. Labor Department, which tracks only large strikes of 1,000 or more workers, recorded 20 strikes in the first 11 months of 2022, up 33% from the same period in 2021.
Numerous nurses’ strikes were among the reported work stoppages, with many unions citing cases of burnout and health problems among members.
Four of the 20 strikes reported by the Labor Department last year involved nurses’ unions. The largest was a three-day strike by the 15,000 members of the Minnesota Nurses Association that involved 13 hospitals in the state.
– CNN’s Tina Burnside, Artemis Moshtaghian and Ramishah Maruf contributed to this report.