A New Year for New Victories
Happy new year to all our members and their families! The new year is always a time when I like to reflect on past years and on new beginnings. This year, I am reflecting on where I was approximately two years ago.
In early January 2023, I was outside in the cold, walking the picket line with Mount Sinai and Montefiore nurses fighting for fair contracts. We were at the very end of our historic New York City private sector campaign contract, which brought together a record number of nurses from all five boroughs for one contract fight. It was our largest coordinated campaign in NYSNA history, and it was the most successful.
But it was also hard fought. We didn’t make history with safe staffing, our wage increases or saving our healthcare benefits, because our bosses gave us those things. We won them because we organized, bargained on a common platform and stayed united.
This year, we will have a similar fight. We will bargain with 17,000 nurses at 17 hospitals throughout New York again — from the smallest safety hospitals to the largest academic medical centers. In some ways, this fight will be much harder than two years ago. Our bosses have become comfortable with the post-COVID-19 world. Hospitals are not prioritizing getting staffing levels back up to where they were pre-pandemic. They’re not prioritizing nurses’ health and safety. They’re not prioritizing patients. But they are prioritizing their profits.
They Put Profits Before Patients
If you saw the latest executive pay data since the COVID-19 pandemic, you might be shocked.1 You would definitely be disgusted. At our facilities, we hear day after day about how our hospitals are struggling and how they can’t staff to legal safe staffing standards because they just can’t afford it. We know that safe staffing improves patient care and patient outcomes. Quality care indicators in New York would improve if hospitals put patients over profits — and their own executive pay.
We know many of our hospitals have recovered financially. They just haven’t let that recovery trickle down to staff and patients. Some are investing in executive salaries and bonuses. Some are spending their resources on lobbying and baseless lawsuits to fight against the safe staffing gains that NYSNA nurses have made. Others are investing in restructuring, real estate investments and construction projects, all while letting patient care take the back seat.
We Are Unstoppable
Hospitals would love to make our current conditions the new normal in healthcare: where we always have lean, bare-bones staffing; where our healthcare and other benefits are constantly under attack; and where we’re excluded from key decisions that impact patient care.
We’re not going to let that happen. I know that we will take the lessons we learned from two years ago and apply them to our new contract fight in 2025. We will win new victories. Our New York private sector hospitals may be in different boroughs, be different sizes and have different challenges on the frontlines. The hospital executives in charge may also be different. But all our bosses are operating from the same playbook — they want to maximize their profits, even if that comes at the expense of their nurses and patients.
Fortunately, NYSNA members are getting to work early this year on our own playbook. I know that when we unite, we are unstoppable. And I can’t wait to get to work and make history again this year.
Sources
1. Robinson, David. “As NY’s health care quality ranked poorly, hospital executives pocketed $79M in bonuses,” Lower Hudson Journal News, Nov. 13, 2024. Accessed at https://bit.ly/4frWU1t