Peter Allen-Lamphere: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you started the contract campaign for this current contract and how you began organizing your coworkers before the strike?
Annelise MacLeod: I guess I’ve been on the committee the shortest period of time, but I can say that in the last year our committee learned some lessons from our last contract battle and transparency was pretty much the name of the game for all of us. We had a major focus, at least in the last year, on making sure that there’s a union presence in our unit. And so we all put in a lot of effort going around our units, talking to nurses, educating them about our contract, just to get people to recognize us and learn how to understand our contract. And as we led up to the contract battle, we started doing education with NYSNA’s Labor Education department, doing Union 101 classes and Contract 101 classes, Strike 101 classes. We were just trying to get people to be aware as things went on. We started having pretty regular meetings. We started negotiating in August, and we started weekly meetings at the end of August and then it became biweekly in October. We just wanted to make sure that people knew what was going on and had a connection to us as well.
P A-L: So you’ve been meeting twice a week since October?
AM: I’d say since the end of September, probably twice a week. And then towards the very end of our contract, it was almost daily that we were having meetings with our members, primarily via Zoom. We did have some unit meetings that were in person, but we found that Zoom was more helpful for getting more people on board.
Sophie Boland: I was going to say the same thing as Annelise. I think for all of us on the committee from the very beginning of even being a committee, but definitely in terms of organizing for the contract, transparency and honesty were our primary focuses. It was very intentional. We wanted to make sure that whatever information we were getting we were transmitting as honestly as we possibly could with the mindset that we’re all adults, we all have decision-making power and we can only make those decisions with the right information. And so we don’t need to gatekeep anything we can transmit to our members, explain, and allow them to make different decisions. And because we work with some very educated and very political and analytical people, we all sort of came to the same conclusions and have been on the same page about things.
It’s really helped with organizing against a boss that’s pure evil. People have seen that more and more. Through negotiations and even into strike, just recognizing there are people that have worked here at this hospital for decades and have spent their entire careers here at this hospital, and so would’ve felt, prior to the strike, that the hospital would honor their loyalty and would take care of them in some way. I think the strike has really opened people’s eyes that that is not their primary interest.
And just like Annelise was saying, our organizing has been super grassroots, just going and talking to people and figuring out what their issues are and unifying everybody around this idea that maybe it’s not your coworker, maybe it’s not each other, that it’s the boss that’s creating these situations where we are forced to fight for resources. There is no scarcity of resources; it’s the boss that’s withholding from us.
Another thing that we all did to prepare for this fight…we all [took on] this role that the union offered us, which was called a union release position. So we got released from our positions at the bedside and we just did union organizing for a month.
Each one of us took one per month starting in September. And so we each were able to focus on our specific areas but also learn more about the hospital as a whole and learn about the functions of our union leadership and resources and how to mobilize those things effectively. I think that’s helped all of us recognize the power structures that exist in our workplace, but also in the union at a larger scale, which I think has really helped all of us know what fight we’re fighting and how to do that the best way.
Rhonda Middleton-Roches: I want to add that we went heavy on educating the members about the steps in negotiations because the three of us were not on the last executive committee. As a matter of fact, the majority of the current committee was not on the last one. We got active because we wanted to see a difference. And one thing we all had in common was we felt we weren’t educated enough about the process to feel empowered to have a say or a decision in the process. I would say that was one of the greatest things we did, because that’s what helped us to be so strong right now, because people understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and where we’re at in the process.
P A-L: So it sounds like there were some real concerns about transparency in the last contract round.
R M-R: Yes, there were. I think it was some concern about transparency but also not being educated enough because some of the concerns I had, I learned that I just didn’t understand the process.
SB: And I think the mindset prior to even this fight was like, “Oh, the union will do it. The union will take care of it. You don’t have to engage because there are people who are going to, so don’t worry.” And I don’t think that it all came from a bad place, but I think that it allowed people to disengage. And I think zooming forward to today, there are people who are now realizing, “If I don’t do it, it doesn’t happen. If I don’t engage, it won’t happen. If there’s something that I need, I have to tell someone. If there’s things that need to be advocated for, I have to do it or no one’s going to.” So I think that’s been super helpful and productive for us. I think whenever we do get the opportunity to go back inside this hospital, we are not the same nurses that came out.
P A-L: So tell me a little bit about the decision to actually go out on strike. How did you guys make that collectively? What were the main issues that people felt passionate about? How did that go?
AM: So when we started negotiating, we started working on our proposals and things we wanted to improve. The first step we took was a bargaining survey for our members, which we distributed in May to get a sense of what our members’ priorities were.
And then we collected that information and analyzed it and came up with priorities from NYSNA, for citywide priorities, and then our local hospital specific issues. One of the biggest issues for us at New York-Presbyterian is staffing enforcement. In the last contract battle, because Montefiore and Mount Sinai Main went out on strike, they had much stronger staffing enforcement language. We have some staffing enforcement language, but there are a lot of delays in the process. And so expedited staffing enforcement was a major priority. Obviously, improved staffing for a number of the units: the clinics needed improved staffing, the emergency rooms needed improved staffing, the neonatal ICU and some of the CHONY (Children’s Hospital of New York) units. There’s a med-surge CHONY unit that needs better staffing. So staffing enforcement and better staffing.
R M-R: We had a monthly meeting with management, and we also had a location where these staffing numbers were continuously brought up, so it wasn’t new to management or us. These numbers and these units that needed help were known over the three years. This is something the hospital has been aware of for three years. So it hurts to see that they’re holding off on something that they knew we were going to deal with at negotiations.
AM: All of our priorities have data backing them. We know what we need for our staffing numbers because of all of the work we’ve done speaking to nurses on the unit, assessing what the nurses need, analyzing complaints and reports the nurses filed. Workplace violence is still something we’re working on addressing in this contract, and we had data coming out of a workplace violence committee.
Just simple asks, for most of it. In the workplace violence proposal, one thing that we’ve asked for is plexiglass to protect people at the triage desk from having things thrown at them (they have had things thrown at them and they’ve been injured as a result). And our hospital has claimed that you cannot curve plexiglass. And this has been an ask that we’ve had for three years
I know Canal Plastics on Canal Street could probably do it in a day, but it’s been three years of us trying to get it. We wanted controls, too, on artificial intelligence and virtual nursing. One of our directors of nursing in the CHONY hospital, Melanie Gordon, is the chair for AI. They’ve brought in virtual sitters, which are people on video cameras watching people who are at risk of falling, at risk of removing IVs, or just at risk of injuring themselves. And so they have a virtual sitter program that’s supposed to save staff and is supposed to be as safe as a regular person sitting there, and it’s not. But we wanted controls on artificial intelligence and virtual nursing programs so that we don’t lose bargaining unit members and also have a say in the process.
R M-R: Job security. Because over the past three years of our contract, they have tested our language and proved that our language wasn’t strong enough. If they did not test it, we wouldn’t even honestly have paid attention to it. But they laid off midwives and they replaced them with non-union midwives. So they said they were getting rid of the service and then let a cool-down period happen and later replaced them with non-union. Then they went ahead and laid off some nurse practitioners from small units. And that wasn’t enough for them. Last year around May, they laid off a thousand people in the hospital. Out of that, 40 were nurses and nurse practitioners. And the reason they gave for their layoff made no sense originally. They said, “Oh, because of what was happening in politics and the Big Beautiful Bill.” That bill hadn’t even passed yet. We are the richest hospital. We don’t depend on Medicaid and Medicare as much as others. So for them to use that as an excuse… it was just sad to see them do that. Then they changed what they were saying, and said it was because of performance. Every minute they changed their reason. We knew they had no reason, because they just paid out a billion to victims of the doctors who assaulted patients.
AM: So how could you tell nurses that you’re laying us off because you don’t have money? That really hurt! We decided that during this contract, we have to fix it. The process was tedious because even the hospital didn’t realize that the language hadn’t been touched for years, I think about 20 or 30 years. It’s been a long time. So we had to negotiate certain stuff during that time with the hospital to have a productive session and to make sure these nurses and nurse practitioners could transition as smoothly as possible. It wasn’t smooth and even the hospital agreed that some of these processes weren’t smooth.
R M-R: We took this process and decided to make it part of our contract, and some processes [the hospital] agreed to, yet they then sat there during the contract [negotiations] and said they don’t agree to it. But they agreed to it during the layoff process! It was a lot of delay tactics that didn’t make sense, because these were issues we were dealing with before the actual contract expired and on some of these issues we were close. On the AI and layoff [issues], we literally agreed to certain language. So we were confused about why, when it came down to it, they stalled and stopped everything. It didn’t make sense to us.
AM: They definitely engaged in delay tactics, stonewalling and very bad faith bargaining with our job security language. One of the things that we are holding out for is language that says that they cannot replace a bargaining unit member with a person doing the same work who is a non-bargaining unit member. So the midwives who are at the Allen, they laid them off, like Rhonda said, replaced them with Columbia-employed (not NYP employed) midwives, and they’re not unionized and they’re paid less and their benefits cost less to NYP and to Columbia.
R M-R: And they replaced nurse practitioners with residents.
AM: They got rid of a cardiac nurse practitioner who had been working for 20 years in that role. So there’s a lot of longevity and just a continuity of care for those patients. And she was one of the sole people providing care consistently to the same population while residents kind of rotated throughout their training process. And so now these patients—there are children with very complex, longstanding chronic conditions—have rotating providers rather than somebody who has known them for most of their childhood.
P A-L: Can you tell me a little bit about the decision to go out on strike, what that looked like, how you made that decision collectively?
AM: We did strike assessments. So we did our education and then we did strike assessments to educate people about how to plan for strike and got an unofficial assessment. It was on paper cards to see if people were prepared to go out on strike. And they were. We had our official strike authorization vote and we got 98% of the nurses to vote, and of that vote, it was 98.6%, I think, that voted in favor of a strike. So we presented a strike vote to our membership and overwhelmingly the nurses at our facility voted to authorize a strike. Our contract expired on the 31st of December. We did not give strike notice until the 2nd of January because we did it in conjunction with all of the other hospitals.
So we gave our 10-day strike notice on the 2nd of January. We negotiated for 12 hours a day, every day, leading up to the 11th of January. And we had those daily calls with our members to assess how they were feeling, and the energy was really good. People trusted us, and they trusted us because we’d also fought really hard for open bargaining for our members—and near the hospital. The hospital kept trying to mess with that, tried to have us bargaining on 57th Street or 125th Street. So we made sure that people were able to come to bargaining, were well versed in the process, and were excited and prepared to go out.
R M-R: We did educate our members. We were doing deadline bargaining, so they were aware, the hospital was aware, everybody was aware, it was deadline bargaining and the contract was up on the 31st. And as Annelise said, we were educating them to understand which stage we were at. So they were informed when we were at the stage of strike authorization votes. And also because of open bargaining, they experienced what we were going through and they saw that the hospital was stalling. They saw that the majority of what we needed, or top five, wasn’t even touched. So they were aware that we were going nowhere at that point, when we reached December 31st.
P A-L: Did you have open bargaining in the 2023 contract or not?
AM: Yes, we did. The challenge that we had with our last contract—we weren’t on the executive committee last time—but the bargaining last time was all via Zoom remotely. It was a holdover from COVID times. So I was a Contract Action Team member, and I believe Rhonda was as well, we called it CAT, but we weren’t educated.
R M-R: We didn’t really understand what open bargaining was.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t come over. I didn’t know that that’s what it meant. So us educating people and really pushing and explaining made a huge difference.
AM: We did have open bargaining last time, but it was sitting in a room with the rest of the executive committee and NYSNA staff as they talked to a Zoom screen. And it was a frustrating experience to watch. The lawyer and the bargaining team were just as rude, but I think having it in person, people have been really able to see the rudeness themselves.
P A-L: So I imagine there probably was a point early on in the strike where you guys realized this was not going to be a three-day battle and that you’re going to have to fight over the long haul. What was that like? Tell me a little bit about the dynamics on the picket line in the first few weeks.
AM: NYP continued their pattern of delaying bargaining, not really coming to the table and making it pretty clear that they were not eager for a contract. They would come sometimes while we were on strike. They’d come to bargaining for 45 minutes, cumulatively, and we would be there for hours working on proposals, talking to our members, et cetera. But a lot of it was spent waiting for them to come. And so when we went on strike, it was the way that they were behaving. They were just stonewalling us. They were extremely hostile to proposals. They outright rejected things, and they delayed giving us counters to our proposals. It just became clear that they did not have a timeline that they were working towards.
R M-R: I would say for me it was when a couple days after we gave the notice and Governor Hochul did her executive order, because when that happened, they point blank stopped coming to negotiate.
They just stopped negotiating and we know what was on the table and we are saying, “If you’re not meeting with us, there’s no way we will get this done by the 12th.” I feel like that’s when we felt something was wrong and this will not be three days. We were hoping when we gave that notice, we would get the ball rolling and we would go all in, and they did the opposite. And then we saw the order and we said, “Oh, this is why they’re doing the opposite.”
Personally, I don’t want to talk for anybody, but I didn’t expect it would’ve been this impactful [for] this long.
AM: It’s evident that New York-Presbyterian prepared for a long strike. I think that they were prepared last time. Because we didn’t go out on strike last time, they just said, “Oh boy, more money!” And they’ve just been saving even more for the last three years. We delivered our strike notice on January 2nd, and I know for previous committees, they would negotiate contracts until 2:00 a.m. Management would be there, or on Zoom, but they would be in the room trying to prevent a strike. And we delivered the strike notice on January 2nd, at 1:00 p.m. or so. And management just flat out refused to come to the table. They didn’t meet with us that weekend either.
R M-R: Even before the notice, they knew it was deadline bargaining and we didn’t give the notice before the deadline and they just weren’t coming to the table. Or they would cut sessions short or we had to leave at 3:00 because they had a “hard cutoff.” We have a contract to get by the 31st. What do you mean they’re leaving at 3:00 p.m.? This is people’s livelihood. But I would say before the deadline they were acting really weird. They weren’t worrying about getting a contract.
AM: And even when we went out on strike, we’d have 4,000 nurses out on strike and they would not meet with us from nine to five. They would meet with us from 5:00 to 11:00 p.m. and I don’t know what was more important than negotiating a contract, but they decided to not negotiate it during regular business hours.
R M-R: And when we went out on strike, they decided to limit the number of nurses in the room.
P A-L: Interesting. How many people could come to the bargaining?
AM: We were negotiating at Columbia at that time. Columbia University School of Nursing has strict security. So unless you have a Columbia University ID, they won’t let you in the room. And so they hadn’t restricted it before, but then we had a tense negotiation session and I think that they were scared of having nurses in the room. So they tried to use Columbia’s security to restrict members from coming to bargaining. They initially tried to have only a list of the executive committee who could come, and they had police and campus security there trying to block our members and we were able to negotiate through a mediator (we had a mediator who wasn’t the most effective) that 70 nurses could come to the room. So they just kept playing games with us.
P A-L: I have to say that the picket line is one of the most vibrant and lively picket lines I’ve been to in my life—I’ve been to a lot of them. Even in the freezing cold that we’ve had in the last month, how did you keep spirits up?
AM: Our DJs are some of the biggest sources of energy. So we have multiple strike lines at Allen, CHONY, Milstein, and we have DJs who are nurses or the relatives or spouses of nurses. We’ve been crowdsourcing funds for generators for them. And they’ll come and DJ on the line and it’s really, really fun. In the beginning, the Teamsters came with the fat pig guy, so we had a lot of support from other unions in the beginning. NYSNA had a lot of food, but I think one of the biggest things is probably the DJs. It’s been really helpful. And nurses are used to being quiet, so we’re very glad to scream.
R M-R: I think also what helped is the network of strike captains we have. We gave people tasks. So when you have a role to play or something to do, you tend to [show up]. We have each person responsible for 10 people, so they’re touching base with their members, saying, “Hey, come on.” And people start to group as a unit, people start to come together and make signs. We had a sign making party. I think it created that unity. That’s one [thing]. The other thing is, like I mentioned, these are topics we got from the members. These are issues the members were experiencing. And because they were in open bargaining and saw that the boss was the one who didn’t want to proceed, I think it riled them up to see this isn’t the executive committee, this is our boss who doesn’t want us to have what we need.
AM: Then the strike lines themselves, we track attendance and obviously it’s not the most reliable—I forget to scan in—but we have our strike captains and staffers track attendance. And for people who have slipped off a little bit or haven’t come, we reach out to them and ask what’s going on. So we stay connected as much as possible. And a lot of units have done unit-based [strike teams]… They have a spot where they sit on the strike line and so they’ll know, “Oh, this unit, Five Garner North, is by the speakers,” and they’ll be able to find each other and find people that they know on the strike line. So somebody is always there.
P A-L: Awesome! So when the mediator’s recommendations came down–I guess it was on Sunday, February 8th, last week–tell a little bit of the story of what happened next. What was the reaction from your executive committee and what did NYSNA do?
AM: So we had been working with our own mediator, David Thaler, and all of the hospitals had their own mediators. David had been trying to mediate the contract since a little bit before the strike. He came in to try to prevent the strike. Hochul and Mamdani put out a directive for us to negotiate en-masse, all of the hospitals in one location. We were essentially to drop a lot of our proposals and negotiate in the same place, which was farther away from our members. So we were a little pissed about doing that.
P A-L: When did that happen? Right at the beginning of the strike or towards the end?
AM: It was in the middle. After the strike started. We had still been negotiating near our hospital and then we got this directive from NYSNA and from politicians to negotiate under one roof and not doing alliance bargaining where we are all bargaining the same contract together but negotiating our own contract. But in many [ways], it seems like they were still trying to negotiate the same contract for all of us.
R M-R: The main thing I remember was that they told us what we were going to gain from coming under the same roof was that we were going to get back our health insurance, because before that the health insurance was off the table [and other give-backs were threatened].
AM: We had to do a lot more fighting because they had us come under one roof with the understanding that our health insurance wouldn’t be gutted. And we went under the same roof and that was not something that the hospitals actually had agreed to.
So we were a little bit misled, I would say, by the mediators and our elected officials. But we stayed under the same roof and continued to try to negotiate and have solidarity amongst all the committees. There was also distrust amongst all the executive committees of the hospitals because of previous contracts. They’ve done alliance bargaining. There were a lot of personality clashes, let’s say, and there was a fair amount of mistrust in that some committees were willing to betray others. And so we worked on our own communication and solidarity with all of the committees. Going under the same roof was actually beneficial to that. We were in the same building and could have meetings as executive committees together to discuss our particular hospital’s priorities. When the mediator proposal did come down to us, we…didn’t love it.
R M-R: Most of it was the boss’s last proposal.
AM: Yes.
R M-R: Every day was the last proposal we got from the boss. So we were shocked because, like, if it’s a mediator proposal, why is the majority of it the boss’s last proposal?
AM: It was givebacks.
R M-R: There was nothing there. That was our last proposal. So we were like, this isn’t right, for this to be a mediator proposal. However, every committee had their must-haves and the two must-haves were not there for NYP.
Two major asks for us at that moment were more staffing to be added into specific units that really needed it and improvement in job security language. To my understanding, Montefiore got their major must-haves, which was addressing their hallway patient overcrowding issue and staffing for specific areas. Mt. Sinai got their must-haves, which was the discipline removed for the nurses, and they got staffing for specific areas. So that’s where the breakdown happened. Everybody got their must-haves except NYP.
AM: And we all had a fair amount of pressure placed on us to accept the mediator proposal. When I say pressure, I would say it was coming from not just the mediators, but also NYSNA.
So Mt. Sinai, Morningside West and Morningside Main (which are two separate tables), ultimately did accept the contract. Montefiore was still on the fence and we were on the fence on the last Sunday. Montefiore accepted in the middle of the night.
Basically, we were being pressured. At 1:00 a.m. we were told we have to accept this proposal, that we have no other choice. It was a tough decision, because they tried to do some wiggling to try to get what we needed from the contract, but NYSNA was not able to do it. The mediator, Martin Scheinman, was not able to agree. He did not agree to that. Management did not agree to it. So ultimately we said we couldn’t accept the contract. We were the only hospital when we woke up on Monday morning that still did not have a tentative agreement.
There were a lot of problems with the mediator proposal. Like Rhonda said, it was givebacks just from us. I don’t know what management gave up.
P A-L: Scheinman has played a really big role in hurting city employees’ healthcare in the last ten years.
AM: We didn’t really want to bring him in as a mediator. He had mediated our last contract and they said that he’s a very effective mediator. They used the phrase that he would “crack heads.” And so he was brought in to negotiate over our healthcare issues and then just didn’t meet. He kept being used by NYSNA to try to negotiate these contracts. And I think that he had a very large hand in the mediator proposal.
R M-R: Another issue for me with the mediator proposal was that the new mediator listed on this proposal did not meet with the executive committee. It was clear to me in that proposal as it had more management-friendly language.
AM: And the executive committee wasn’t particularly involved in negotiating and communicating with mediators. A lot of it came through “big” NYSNA, like Eric [Smith], who was the field director. He did a fair amount of negotiations and it didn’t seem like he was aware of what our issues were on the table.
R M-R: And that’s not how we were negotiating the entire time from August up until halfway through. We, the 12 of us, plus our lead negotiator, had always been at that table. At the end it was broken down where it wasn’t being done like that. And like I said, we speak on behalf of our membership, so when you separate us from the process, you’re separating the members from the process. Hence why what happened, happened, where they tried to force a vote and they got a “no”.
P A-L: So tell me a little bit more about that process. How did you guys organize the no vote? What did that look like?
AM: So we got an email at 3:51 p.m. from “Big NYSNA,” from Pat Kane and Nancy Kaleda and the people in executive roles at NYSNA, now saying that members have asked and they want to be able to vote on the contract and therefore we are going to present the contract to our members in 10 minutes time.
R M-R: NYSNA leaders did not have any conversation with us before sending out the vote. They sent us an email at 3:51 p.m. notifying us that they overrode our choice and were sending a vote out to our members that same day at 4 p.m. Since I was on the picket line, I did not see this email.
AM: That was on Tuesday. Even on Monday we had met with NYSNA and our lead negotiator, discussing next steps… And then Tuesday afternoon we got, “Surprise! We’re going to be going over your head. We’re going to present this to the members to ratify, and your nurses are going to have from 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday to 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday. You’re going to have 25 hours to do an only online vote,” which is not enough time to educate about a contract. And it was also pretty upsetting because multiple people told me, including my best friend, that they saw the email and assumed it was coming from me, like the executive committee.
And so they said, “Oh, great. Annelise says yes, perfect. I will vote yes in favor of this contract.” So we had an emergency meeting. We also lost our NYSNA resources.
R M-R: We were locked out.
AM: NYSNA locked their staff people in a room and gave them 20 minutes’ notice that they were going to do this. And told them that if they didn’t force a yes vote from our members, and didn’t prove that they were trying to force a yes vote, that they would fire the staffers. And so we had no resources from NYSNA, but we were able to get a Zoom call. Was it 6:00 p.m.?
R M-R: Yes.
AM: One of the nurses had a tenant association Zoom account. And so she paid to increase it so that we could have a large capacity come on.
R M-R: The rank and file members were a big part of this because we already spoke to them the day before and explained what happened. So the rank and file members said, “What is this?” And we got that Zoom together real quick and let them know we were not sure what was happening. All we knew was that NYSNA leadership pushed a vote out without our input or consent and we were locked off from NYSNA resources. This came as a surprise to us since we discussed the mediation proposal with our membership the day after we declined it and we had plans in motion for negotiations. We had already sent emails to NYP decision makers requesting negotiation dates.
AM: So we were able to organize the “no” vote within a couple of hours because we had such extensive communication networks. We all have our own chats with our strike captains and people from various units, then we also have our own unit [chats], and then we have larger chats that are hospital-wide. And so we basically sent out the same message and just communicated that this was something that we had rejected as the executive committee. A lot of people said they voted no in the contract because of the way that it was pulled over the executive committee, because we’ve spent so much time within our bargaining unit getting to be known. People said that they voted no for it not only because it doesn’t have the staffing enforcement, et cetera, but because of the way that we were treated as their executive committee.
R M-R: And the “yes” vote was skewed also because a lot of people told us in that meeting that they voted “yes” originally, when they thought the executive committee had sent it. So when they found out we didn’t send it, they were so upset. They said, “That yes is not a yes.” And that is proven because I think the hospital thought that yes was true. They opened the door thinking it was going to get that amount of “yes” votes. And it surely did not because a lot of the yeses were not yeses to the contract. They were yeses to the executive committee trying to support us, not knowing it didn’t come from us.
AM: And people didn’t realize that they were actually voting to ratify the contract. People had asked us on Monday, “Can we have a mock vote to see if we might have accepted this?” And we didn’t. I guess ultimately NYSNA decided to do a real mock vote.
P A-L: The rank and file actions that nurses have organized independent of the union over the last few weeks have been really impressive. The march over the Brooklyn Bridge, the pickets at Hochul’s office and so on. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re planning to do next and how folks who aren’t in the union show support and solidarity with the strike?
AM: We’ve been writing consistent letters to the trustees, both nice letters and less nice letters. Obviously we’ve been trying to encourage picket line attendance. We’ve encouraged sending letters to the trustees, working with other local unions and DSA, trying to communicate and get support from other unions. That would be something ideally NYSNA helps coordinate. But it seems like it’s been based on a lot of personal connections. Thursday, we’re doing a march across the George Washington Bridge, which is by our hospital. People are going to start on the Jersey side and walk across the bridge.
R M-R: The line is our focus right now, just trying to keep the lines going because members are asking, “Can other people support us? Can we see other people here?”
I know Mount Sinai and Montefiore nurses have been coming even though they ratified. They have been supporting us, bringing food. That’s one of the biggest things that boost our members morale, seeing other people on the line with us.
AM: And finances have also been a challenge. People are now really, really starting to feel the hurt of being out for thirty-six days. NYSNA has their own hardship fund, but there’s not a lot of transparency around it. So we have our own fundraiser that we’re coordinating with treasurers from each hospital. If people need emergency help, they can apply for the Spotfund. And we’re going to be distributing those funds as best as we can to people who need it, particularly to help them with [not] crossing the picket line. We also have coordinated a resources document for Medicaid. We had a little help clinic today, very informal, to help people who are in financial straits to receive access to services and benefits available to them: food pantries, Medicaid, whatever they might need.
P A-L: Obviously the role of politicians has been really contradictory throughout the whole strike, from verbal support and then Hochul extending this executive order over and over again. Can you clarify the importance of the executive order? What would you ask of politicians like Mayor Mamdani and others to support the strike?
AM: The executive order has been extended repeatedly. Our question is, “Why is there a state of emergency if only one hospital is out on strike?” So we’ve asked NYSNA to investigate and ask Hochul as to why [a strike at] just one hospital is a state of emergency. Because it seems targeted. It seems like there is far too much support being given to this one hospital in an attempt to disrupt our collective bargaining process.
I think from the rest of our elected officials—we’ve kind of given up on Hochul being a supporter—but we’d ask for their support.
We want to be able to get back to work, and we want to be able to get back to work safely. And right now the conditions in the hospital are not safe with the scab nurses, and the conditions prior to going out on strike were not safe. We want to be able to return to work and provide the best care to our patients. I’d ask that politicians support and get NYP to negotiate with us.
We’re asking for the industry standard, essentially, for staffing enforcement. We want the same language that the other hospitals have. We want more staff, and we want there to be some sort of accountability so we can enforce staffing. At this point, we can’t really. It’s just on paper that we’re able to enforce staffing. We don’t want our hospital to bust our union, and we want to be able to provide the best care.
So I think that what we’re asking for is pretty reasonable. All we’re asking for is just support for the nurses who will take care of New Yorkers and our patients. Because as nurses, we are the advocates for our patients in every way. And our hospital has repeatedly tried to silence our voices, not just with the strike, but even when we were working, they disciplined us for engaging in collective action. They discipline us for alerting enforcement agencies to problems, for even just notifying our manager that we think that the staffing conditions are unsafe. Our primary role as nurses is to be an advocate. And that’s our job. So we want to be able to do our job.
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