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Nurses and two large hospital systems in New York City reached tentative agreements that would end a nearly monthlong strike over staffing levels, workplace safety and other contract issues, the New York State Nurses Association said. The tentative deals were announced Monday and cover Montefiore and the Mount Sinai hospital system, while nurses remained on strike at NewYork-Presbyterian. The union said nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai will vote to ratify the contracts starting Monday, and if the agreements are ratified, nurses would return to work Saturday.
For more than four weeks, the walkout drew attention to staffing and safety demands as the strike began Jan. 12. Hospital staff and union leaders pointed to the effects of the disruption during New York’s winter flu season, including the hospitals’ effort to hire temporary nurses to fill staffing gaps, while negotiators sought new contract terms.
The tentative agreements would cover roughly 10,500 of the approximately 15,000 nurses on strike at some of the city’s biggest private, nonprofit hospitals, according to the union. The union said the proposals would run three years and address issues that included staffing and workplace violence protections, along with health-insurance terms.
The union said the tentative pacts call for a 12% pay raise over three years and would maintain nurses’ health benefits with no additional out-of-pocket costs. The agreements also include new protections against workplace violence, with specific protections for transgender and immigrant nurses and patients, the union said. The union also said the proposals include provisions addressing artificial intelligence in hospitals.
Nancy Hagans, president of the New York State Nurses Association, said in a statement that nurses had “held the line in the cold and in the snow for safe patient care” for four weeks and that nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai were “heading back to the bedside with our heads held high.”
At Montefiore, a spokesperson declined to comment beyond confirming that nurses would be voting through Wednesday. At Mount Sinai, Brendan Carr, the health system’s chief executive, told hospital staff that the organization would take time to “rebuild the momentum” after a “long and difficult” negotiation, adding, “I commit to you that we will heal the organization together in the service of continuing to help people to live longer and better lives.”
While two hospital systems moved toward ratification votes, the union said the strike remained in effect at NewYork-Presbyterian. The hospital said it agreed over the weekend to a proposal from mediators that included pay raises, preserves nurses’ pensions, maintains health benefits and increases staffing levels, and the union responded that no deal had been reached.
Nurses picketed outside NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan on Monday. Jennifer Lynch said staffing levels and job security were among the top issues in negotiations, calling it “incredibly frustrating that other employers are willing to give fair contracts to their employees and ours has yet to do that.” Maria Tsoi, a NewYork-Presbyterian nurse, said her hospital’s emergency department treats as many as 300 patients at a time and that the staffing levels were inadequate, adding, “So what we’re asking is for more nurses,” and “That’s why we want the hospital to hire more nurses, so that we can better care for our patients.”
The affected hospital systems said their operations continued during the walkout, with organ transplants, cardiac surgeries and other complex procedures largely uninterrupted, though many medical centers canceled scheduled surgeries, transferred some patients and discharged others ahead of the strike. Nurses said staffing remained a central sticking point, describing being overworked and arguing that the hospitals held out on committing to more manageable patient loads before the tentative agreements were reached.
The strike also reflected broader contract disputes involving workplace security and the use of artificial intelligence. The hospitals said the union’s demands were too high, and they described unionized nurses’ salaries as averaging between $162,000 and $165,000 a year, not including benefits, while the union argued that top hospital executives make millions of dollars annually.