NYC hospitals prep for nurse strike amid negotiations

NEW YORK (AP) — Negotiations to keep 10,000 New York City nurses from walking off the job headed into a final weekend as some major hospitals were already preparing Friday for a potential strike by sending ambulances elsewhere and transferring some patients, including vulnerable newborns.

The walkout could start early Monday at several private hospitals, including two of the city's biggest: Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, each of which has more than 1,000 beds.

They and a handful of other hospitals are bargaining with nurses who want raises and an end to what they say are untenable staffing squeezes, nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic.

“New York City hospitals have violated our trust through years of understaffing, and that understaffing has only gotten worse since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” nurses' union President Nancy Hagans said at a news briefing Friday. “It’s time they come to the table and deliver the safe staffing standards that nurses and our patients deserve.”

The negotiations follow a number of job actions at other U.S. hospitals as nurses come through a period of shouldering health risks and huge workloads at the peak of the virus crisis. The industry is facing burnout that has since driven many nurses from the profession, or at least from full-time hospital jobs.

Nurses at a Massachusetts hospital went on strike for nearly 10 months ending last January, marking the longest nursing walkout in state history. Thousands of nurses at two California hospitals were on strike for a week in May.

Talks took an acrimonious turn at Mount Sinai, where the union — the New York State Nurses Association — said management had walked away from the bargaining table and called off negotiations Friday.

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