It’s day 14 on the picket line at Mount Sinai Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of 12 hospital locations where over 15,000 nurses unionized with NYSNA, the New York State Nurses Association, are conducting the largest nurses’ strike in NYC history. On each side of Madison Avenue, hundreds of striking nurses stand talking, chanting, and cheering as buses and cars pass by, honking in support. The Mount Sinai building looms over them, with many windows dark and almost no one coming and going through the front entrance. They’re out despite cold, snow, and sleet. When the weather is good, a marching picket line forms around the massive hospital complex, stretching around a full city block.

Nurses are fighting for a contract against three of NYC’s largest and richest private hospital networks: Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian, and Montefiore. Under Trump 2.0, hospitals are cynically using federal Medicaid cuts as an excuse to slash services and lay off nurses while they run away with bigger profits.The strike is a clear demonstration of the way that any gains workers win under capitalism can and will be snatched away by the bosses at the first available opportunity. It’s clear that a broader fight for universal healthcare would enormously benefit both those receiving and those providing healthcare.

A Battle Three Years In The Making

For many nurses, this is a familiar experience. Three years ago, NYSNA nurses from Mount Sinai and Montefiore went on strike for three days for many of the same reasons as they are today, fighting against the same corporate greed that has pushed staffing ratios to dangerous levels, forced nurses to work without adequate equipment, and attacked their wages and benefits. As we said at the time, nurses won a partial victory that pointed to what strike action can achieve. They won pay raises that outstripped other bargaining hospitals that didn’t go on strike. They also won enforceable 4-to-1 safe staffing ratios, a critical victory which they’re now defending from the chopping block.

Nurses Take On Corporate Greed

The nurses’ primary demands are around defending safe staffing ratios, defending against cuts to their benefits (especially healthcare), as well as better protections against workplace violence. Just as before, the nurses striking today are absolutely clear that no matter how the hospitals may try to paint them as selfish and greedy, this is a fight not just for themselves but for their patients and communities. Lindsay, a hospice and palliative care nurse at Mount Sinai, told us: “We are out here on the picket line protesting for patient safety and safe staffing. We want safe ratios, meaning that nurses have enough time to care for each patient, with no delays in care, and high quality care, every day.” As hospital executives squeeze more work for less out of nurses, patient care inevitably degrades. As another nurse on the picket line put it: “If this were about the money, we wouldn’t be out here today. It’s about our safety and our patients’ safety.”

It’s clear that the hospitals could afford to meet these demands. Top hospital executives give themselves payouts and compensation packages that can be hundreds of times greater than what nurses earn. Last year, the CEOs of Montefiore and New York-Presbyterian brought home $16 million and $26 million, respectively! And during the strike, hospitals are bringing in scab nurses, who get paid triple what nurses get paid weekly. The nurses on strike are clear that if you go to any of the striking hospitals right now, you’re not getting high quality care. Scabbing nurses are working in unfamiliar hospitals, aren’t always well-trained for the units they’re working on, and the staffing shortages are even more extreme than usual. Of course, for the hospital executives, staying open to keep the profits rolling in is always going to be more important than providing quality care.

Meanwhile, some striking nurses will start applying for unemployment this week to supplement what their strike fund provides. Their ability to do so comes from an expansion of benefits for striking workers passed by Governor Kathy Hochul last year. While it seems positive on the surface, it’s one more way that corporate-backed politicians will team up with the capitalists to push the cost of their greed onto not just their workers and patients, but onto (largely working-class) taxpayers as a whole. And the hospitals have the nerve to call nurses’ demands “extreme”!

Fund Healthcare, Fight ICE

The strike—and patient care as a whole—are deeply connected to the struggles happening in wider society, and nurses are keen to that fact. As people across the country watch ICE invade Minneapolis and see working people there get organized and fight back, they’re inspired to build the fight against ICE in their own cities. This has has hit nurses close to home as Alex Pretti, himself an ICU nurse, was shot dead in Minneapolis while defending other observers from ICE agents, just a day after workers shut down the city with a general strike.

As Jill, another palliative care nurse at Mount Sinai, explained: “We’re out here fighting for nurses’ rights, and all our rights, and immigrants’ rights. Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing and support, and ICE is an organization that does nothing but terrorize people and tear communities and families apart. We’re going to protect people. We’re going to keep fighting to have those immigrant protections inscribed in our contract. That’s one of the major things we’re out here fighting for.”

This comes on the back of reports of ICE storming into Twin Cities hospitals to abduct people receiving and giving lifesaving medical care. For nurses already stretched thin by unsafe staffing ratios, lack of adequate resources, and burnout, bringing ICE’s chaos and indiscriminate violence into the hospital environment is nothing short of a disaster for patients and nurses alike. No working-class person is safe under Trump’s regime.

To Beat The Bosses, Take On The System

So what will it take for nurses to win against the private hospital behemoths?

NYSNA has said their strike strategy is “one day longer, one day stronger”—also a commonly-heard chant on the picket lines. Many nurses say that the way we win is by staying out on the picket line and not giving in before negotiations have made progress. And nurses absolutely should stay out until their demands are won! As of day 14, nurses have reached an agreement to maintain their healthcare benefits, showing the strength of the strike and potential to win all of their demands.

But if negotiations don’t continue to move forward, nurses will need to escalate their struggle and raise the stakes to force the hospitals to the table.

NYSNA has outlined four steps for community members to support the strike: calling healthcare CEOs to tell them you support the strike, donating to the strike fund, signing a pledge to support nurses, and joining the picket line. These are a good start, but these actions would have more power if they’re organized in coordination with the strike, and done collectively rather than on an individual basis. Nurses already have substantial community support, and this could be mobilized by organizing mass community rallies, tables, and meetings to build active support for the strike. The union should organize a community support division to develop this crucial work.

NYSNA has also encouraged people to contact state legislators and NY Governor Kathy Hochul and tell them to pressure the hospital executives to bargain. We should have no illusions that Hochul or any politicians in the two corporate parties, who are wholly loyal to the private healthcare industry, have the nurses’ interests in mind, and we should go further: the state legislature is currently considering legislation that would establish universal minimum staffing ratios, which will certainly be lobbied against by hospital executives. Healthcare workers and the wider community should use this strike as a jumping off point to get organized and pressure lawmakers to pass the bill.

If safe staffing were enshrined into law (assuming that the law includes specific enforcement mechanisms), nurses wouldn’t have to fight for it every time their contract is up, and could put their energy into other demands. Similarly, winning universal free healthcare would not only remove the corporate bureaucratic nightmare healthcare workers have to wade through, but it would free up union members from having to fight for their own healthcare on a contract-by-contract basis.

This is something that NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani should link to his affordability platform and connect these demands with the need to tax the rich.

Halfway across the country, a mass movement in Minneapolis is learning that the power of the organized working class is the key force in fighting Trump’s right-wing agenda—a lesson that urgently needs to spread nationwide. NYSNA could have used the strike to build for 1/23 solidarity actions with Minneapolis to share lessons about how to strike to win, and build support for their own strike!

A win for nurses would be a win for all workers—both inside and outside of the hospital. That’s why Socialist Alternative NYC is out supporting nurses on the picket line, and calling for nurses and workers everywhere to link up struggles in our workplaces to fight against ICE and against Trump’s anti-worker agenda. All power to the nurses!