Today, January 12, approximately sixteen thousand private-sector nurses with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) will go on strike at multiple hospital locations across New York City, including NY Presbyterian, Montefiore, and Mount Sinai. The action will be the largest nursing strike in the city’s history.
Nurses are fighting for a fair contract that includes pay increases, guaranteed healthcare benefits, pensions, safe staffing standards that were won three years ago but which have not been implemented, and real protections against workplace violence. These demands aren’t abstract. In hospitals across the city, nurses provide care to increasingly sick patients under unsafe ratios, stretched beyond what’s humane or safe for anyone. Nurses aren’t only fighting for themselves — they’re fighting for every New Yorker who depends on safe, dignified care.
Hospital leadership benefits from this crisis. They pit overworked nurses against other staff, while patients suffer and executives protect profits. In the middle of one of the worst flu surges in recent memory, hospital executives are more willing to use patients as bargaining chips than to meet nurses’ basic demands. Nurses, however, refuse to put up with this treatment, and we should rally in support behind them.
This strike is also happening in a broader political context. As the Right under Trump continues its attacks on healthcare, public health infrastructure, and working-class and oppressed communities, the labor movement must be a weapon to fight back. Strikes are one of the most powerful tools we have — not just to defend workers, but to protect public health and well-being more broadly, whether that means fighting hospital austerity, resisting ICE terror in our communities, or opposing escalating imperial aggression abroad that inevitably comes back to harm communities in the U.S.
Nurses are going on strike for patient safety, providing an example for the broader labor movement. We should be willing to go on strike when our communities aren’t safe or when imperialist policy is endangering the working class at home and abroad. This is why we have been calling for a strike across the Americas to fight back against imperialist aggression, which is connected to increasing ICE attacks at home. The common denominator, whether poor healthcare working conditions, imperialist attacks abroad, or ICE murdering folks at home, is a capitalist system and ruling class that sees us all as expendable.
Solidarity to our nursing siblings striking across New York City. If you want to support, show up to a picket line and follow NYSNA for updates.
The post NYSNA Nurses Stage Largest Nursing Strike in New York City History appeared first on Left Voice.
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