Striking NY nurses win agreement. More nurses strikes to come.
Last week 7,000 New York City nurses at two giant NY hospitals went on strike.
Three years of the pandemic, being overworked and underpaid, finally boiled over and enough was enough.
The strike lasted three days before bargaining agreement was reached.
The tentative contract deals the nurses reached with Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx early Thursday would also increase their pay, an agreement the unions and hospitals had largely nailed down before the strike began.
But many nurses on the picket line this week said their main priority was improving working conditions by adding nurses to short-staffed hospital floors where they said crowded conditions had put patients at risk and led to stress and burnout among staff. That also became the priority of the union in the negotiations.
It appears more strikes by healthcare workers can be expected in 2023.
As hospitals across the country try to deal with widespread staffing shortages, overworked nurses burned out by the pandemic and a shortage of new nurses are contributing to an explosive situation.
And it is patients who are also suffering the consequences of overworked healthcare professionals.
Healthcare workers are not only striking for themselves, but for better patient care.
As we teachers always say, good working conditions are good teaching conditions.
For healthcare workers, good working conditions are good patient care conditions.
Union leaders say the tentative contract agreement ending the strike by nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, each privately owned, nonprofit hospitals, may relieve chronic short staffing and boost pay by 19% over three years.
The two hospitals hold over 1,000 beds in New York City.
While the strike at the two NY hospitals has been settled, a national crisis continues.
Last year, six unions representing a total of 32,000 nurses launched strikes outside of hospital systems around the country, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
Those strikes represented about a quarter of all the major strikes in the U.S. last year.
In California, nurse unions at two hospitals are likely to strike this year when their contract expires.
Complicating matters is the aging of the nursing corps.
A policy brief from the Department of Health and Human Services last year found that over half of nurses were over the age of 50, a much higher percentage compared with the overall U.S. labor workforce, where only a quarter of people are 55 or older.
And as with teachers, younger nurses are not lining up to replace them.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports:
Faculty shortages at nursing schools across the country are limiting student capacity at a time when the need for professional registered nurses continues to grow. Budget constraints, an aging faculty, and increasing job competition from clinical sites have contributed to this crisis.