The chants on Amsterdam Avenue were loud, unyielding, and defiant. Nurses in red union scarves and hats stamped their feet against the cold, clutching hand warmers and union signs, their breath visible in the January air. The windchill was biting and growing worse. An improvised jazz trio of saxophone, trombone, and drums played enthusiastically from the picket line, and passing cars and trucks honked in support. State Senator Cordell Cleare stood among them, her voice cutting through the noise with a single word: “Criminal.”
On the fourth day of the largest nurse strike in New York City history, nearly 15,000 nurses remained on picket lines at Mount Sinai, Montefiore, and NewYork-Presbyterian, united by a demand that would seem unremarkable in any other industry: healthcare workers want healthcare. The hospitals’ proposed cuts would affect 44,000 nurses statewide, and the three major private systems involved are collectively sitting on more than $1.6 billion in cash reserves.
“The people who are providing health care should have health care,” Cleare said emphatically. Of the hospitals’ refusal to settle, she added: “I think it’s greedy. I think it’s selfish. It’s irresponsible. And it’s criminal.”
Healthcare Without Coverage
On the Mount Sinai Morningside picket line, Sarah Flynn was in her fourth consecutive day of pounding the cold concrete. A telemetry nurse with two and a half years at the hospital, Flynn spoke with the exhaustion of someone who had made peace with an impossible situation. Last week alone, she cared for three isolation patients: two with the flu, one with COVID. “We get sick from the job all the time and we bring them home to our families,” she said. “I’m in the middle of paying for a wedding and I don’t have health care right now. If something were to happen and I got hit by a bus or something like that, it would be astronomical bills.”
Celeste Danz, a nurse on the geriatric unit known as Nine West, is a mother of two. At work, she is regularly exposed to tuberculosis, MRSA, COVID, and seasonal viruses, all of which can follow her home. “How can a hospital want to cut health insurance for their workers when the majority of the time, when we get sick, it’s from our patients?”
Atziry, a new graduate nurse working night shifts on a med-surg floor, framed it in epidemiological terms. “We expose ourselves every single day,” she said. “Not just to COVID or the flu. We expose ourselves to MRSA or tuberculosis. We’re the front line. We’re the most exposed to sickness.”
Running on Exhaustion
The strike’s proximate cause is the contract dispute over benefits, but nurses described a workplace that had been fraying long before negotiations broke down. On the Nine West geriatric unit, Valentino, a 19-year veteran, rattled off the duties nurses now perform beyond their clinical scope, from drawing blood and running specimens to picking up medications, emptying garbage bins, and cleaning toilets. “Everybody cannot do our job, but we do everybody’s job,” he said.
In theory, the 30-bed unit is supposed to operate at a ratio of one nurse to five patients, with six nurses on shift including a charge nurse. In practice, Valentino said, it’s often five nurses caring for 30 patients with minimal support staff. “It’s impossible to provide adequate care for patients,” Danz added. “We’re just doing tasks now to get things done.”
Arely Flores, a 38-year veteran and charge nurse who works alongside Valentino and Danz, made the case for better ratios. With proper staffing, she explained, nurses can sit down, have conversations, and provide personalized care. “When we have six patients, we don’t have time to get to know our patients. It’s unsafe.”
Nearing retirement, Valentino saw his presence on the picket line as an obligation to those coming after him. “I’m on my way out,” he said. But he wasn’t there for himself. “This is for the future of nursing. Safe staffing saves lives.”
They Can Afford the Emergency, Just Not the Workers
While executives claim they cannot afford fair contracts, they have collectively spent more than $100 million on travel nurses, according to the union. Travel nurses, who fill temporary vacancies during emergencies, earn significantly more than permanent staff. “The hospital has enough money, clearly, to pay these travelers a huge amount of money,” Atziry said. “And I feel like that money can be used elsewhere to improve the care that we provide to these communities.”
“How can you not afford a fair contract when you’re paying travel nurses $8,600 a week?” Danz shot back. “You are paying for their hotel stay. You are paying for their emergency license. But you can’t afford to give us health insurance?”
At Mount Sinai Morningside, managers had warned staff not to “bully” the travelers, according to Flynn. She found it tone-deaf. “You paid for our health care all before this,” she said. “You can’t pay for our health care now. What changed? We didn’t stop doing procedures. We didn’t stop making money as a hospital.”
Violence as a Workplace Condition
Beyond healthcare and staffing, the strike has thrown into sharp relief a crisis that predates these contract negotiations: workplace violence. Just days before nurses walked out, a patient at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital barricaded himself in a blood-spattered room with an elderly patient and a security guard, threatening staff with a knife before being fatally shot by police. In November, an active shooter incident at Mount Sinai Hospital disrupted operations during a shift change; some nurses said they were not adequately informed of the threat.
But on Nine West, the violence is more quotidian, the kind that doesn’t make headlines but looms over every shift. “There’s no metal detectors,” Flores said. “Anybody can jump on in with any weapon and do anything to us. We have been threatened. We have been spat on. We have been cursed out. We have separated people fighting each other, either patients or visitors.”
Up on the ninth floor, delayed response times compound the problem. “By the time security gets there, it’s difficult,” she continued. “And when security does arrive, they often ask nurses what they want them to do, turning the response itself into another demand on nursing staff.”
Atziry described similar lapses in her unit. “There were a couple incidents where we had visitor restrictions on certain family members who were just threatening our nurses on the floor,” she said. “And security let them upstairs, even though they had a visitor restriction.”
On one occasion, Flores recounted, a tech was physically assaulted by a patient. “We call security and security takes 10-15 minutes to come. And then when they come, they ask us, what do we want them to do?” Physicians recommended the patient be placed on a security watch, but the request was denied. Another time, a colleague was nearly put in a headlock.
Even the visitor policy has broken down. The hospital’s rule permits two visitors per patient, but security routinely sends additional visitors to the floor and instructs nurses to manage the overflow themselves. “They say it’s up to us to call security,” Flores said. “That is not our job.” And when nurses try to enforce the policy, patients turn hostile. “Then we are the bad guys.”
A Profession Under Siege
For the 24th consecutive year, Americans rated nurses the most honest and ethical profession in the country, according to a Gallup poll released this week. Seventy-five percent of Americans rated their ethical standards as “very high” or “high,” a distinction they’ve held nearly every year since 1999.
The hospitals, by contrast, are waging an uphill battle for public sympathy. They have hired Risa Heller Communications, a public relations firm best known for representing Harvey Weinstein, Jared Kushner, and the Sackler family, a client list that speaks for itself. “Is there anybody who has stepped in shit who does not call her to clean their shoes?” one journalist remarked.
In the days before the strike, three nurses were fired via voicemail, a move the union characterized as illegal retaliation against labor organizers. Mount Sinai had also disciplined 14 vocal nurse leaders in the lead-up to the walkout. “How are you going to fire somebody who I’m sure they’ve worked with in the system for a good amount of time and fire them through voicemail?” Atziry said. “It’s just so unprofessional and just so unfair.”
Publicly, the hospitals have accused the union of making unreasonable wage demands. Danz pushed back on that characterization. “A lot of people think a lot of it is about, we’re asking for money. We’re asking for 40%, which is not true,” she said. “With the cost of living, me and my colleagues have more than one job. As a nurse, you should not have more than one job.”
For all the energy on the picket line, Flynn was adamant that nurses did not want to be there. “Nobody wants to be out here striking. I would much rather be with my patients, taking care of them.” Still, she rejected the narrative that the nurses had precipitated the conflict. “It’s almost like they wanted us to strike. If they called right now, our union rep would be out of here in a second… They don’t want to negotiate.”
An Official Declaration of Disaster
Before the first nurse walked off the job, Governor Kathy Hochul had already declared a state of emergency. On January 9, three days before the strike began, Hochul signed Executive Order No. 56, designating Bronx, Nassau, and New York Counties as disaster areas due to healthcare staffing shortages. The order suspended licensing requirements for out-of-state medical workers, giving legal cover to a flood of travel nurses the hospitals had been assembling.
In doing so, the state formally recognized that New York’s healthcare system cannot function without its nurses, even as the hospitals that employ them refuse to insure them.
Mediation sessions on Thursday and Friday produced no resolution, and the picket line held. Across all three hospital systems, negotiators remained far apart. But on Amsterdam Avenue, the mood was resolute. The jazz trio played on. Dogs belonging to strikers milled about, unfazed by the cold. Chants echoed off the hospital facade. And the nurses of Nine West prepared for another shift outside, fighting for the healthcare they spend their careers providing to others.
“The best part about nursing is that we have each other,” Danz said. “I’m out here for the long haul.”
Reporting Note
This article draws on original reporting from the January 2026 New York City nurse strike, including interviews with striking nurses and public officials, alongside public records, executive orders, and union materials related to hospital staffing, healthcare benefits, and workplace safety. It also incorporates contemporaneous reporting and research from labor organizations, state agencies, and media outlets, including NYSNA, the New York State government, Gallup, THE CITY, Healthbeat, ABC7, CBS News, and New York Magazine, to situate the strike within broader patterns of healthcare labor conditions and worker safety.
