New York City nurses on strike resumed contract negotiations Thursday with hospital administrators in an effort to bring an end to what the New York State Nurses Association said was the city’s biggest walkout of its kind in decades.
The union said contract negotiations restarted in the morning with officials at the three private hospital systems impacted by the strike: Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.
The union said nurses are committed to bargaining daily to settle the dispute. In a statement ahead of the renewed talks, the union said, “Nurses stand ready to bargain to reach fair contracts and end the strike,” and added that “Nurses will continue to picket and strike until tentative agreements are reached with the hospitals.”
The strike began Jan. 12, when roughly 15,000 nurses walked off the job. The hospitals responded by bringing on thousands of temporary workers to keep operations running, while the union continued to picket and strike.
The renewed discussions this week come at the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the union said. Mamdani spoke Tuesday at a union rally outside Mount Sinai’s hospital on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, alongside U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The union said the contract talks are aimed at protecting nurses’ health care benefits, as well as securing contract provisions addressing staffing levels and safety against workplace violence. Hospitals, however, said the union is seeking “unrealistic” and unaffordable pay raises, and they said they are not proposing to cut nurses’ health benefits, despite the union’s contention.
Last week, the union held one bargaining session with each of the three hospital systems. Those meetings, according to the union, ended with little progress and no plans for further talks.
Each affected hospital is negotiating with the union independently, the union said, because not every hospital run by the three systems is involved. The union also said that other private hospital systems reached tentative agreements with the union, averting walkouts, and that city-run public hospitals are not part of the talks.