NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders rallied with nurses Tuesday in Manhattan during the ninth day of the largest strike of its kind that the city has seen in decades.
The democratic socialists, speaking to a boisterous crowd of nurses in front of Mount Sinai West on the Upper West Side, called on hospital executives to return to the negotiating table to resolve the contract impasse that prompted some 15,000 nurses to walk off the job last week.
“The people of this country are sick and tired of the greed in this health care industry,” said Sanders, the long-serving Vermont senator and a native of Brooklyn, as he rattled off the multimillion-dollar salaries of the CEOs of the three hospital systems affected by the strike.
“Now is your time of need, when we can assure that this is a city you don’t just work in, but a city you can also live in,” Mamdani added.
The nurses union says it has held one bargaining session with each of the three hospital systems impacted — Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian — since the strike began on Jan. 12.
But the sides say those hourslong meetings have ended with little progress, and there are no plans so far this week to resume talks.
“They offered us nothing. It was all performative,” said Jonathan Hunter, a registered nurse at Mount Sinai and a member of the negotiating team.
The New York State Nurses Association met Sunday evening with officials from Montefiore after holding negotiations Friday with Mount Sinai administrators and Thursday with NewYork-Presbyterian officials.
Hospital administrators say they’ll follow the lead of contract mediators on when to meet again with their union counterparts. Each affected hospital is negotiating with the union independently.
The hospitals say the union is proposing pay raises that amount to a 25% salary increase over three years. They maintain the request is unreasonable, as their nurses are already among the highest paid in the city.
“NYSNA’s demands ignore the economic realities of healthcare in New York City and the country,” NewYork-Presbyterian said in a statement Tuesday, citing federal cuts to Medicaid, as well as rising overall costs.
Outside Mount Sinai West on Tuesday morning, nurses and their supporters marched in the frigid cold, chanting “one day longer, one day stronger” as a caravan of New York City taxi drivers honked their horns in support.
Nicole Rodriguez, a nurse at Mount Sinai West, said her biggest concern in the contract dispute is preserving her health care benefits.
She said she has an autoimmune disease that causes her to get sick often and pass along illnesses to her child.
“If my son is not well, I’m not well, and I can’t be at the bedside and be the nurse I want to be,” she said. “I hope management opens their eyes to how much support we have out here, and they see that they need to reach into their pockets and give the nurses their health care.”
The union says the hospitals are seeking to reduce nurses benefits but the hospitals say they’ve proposed maintaining their current employer-funded benefits, which they say exceed what most private employees receive.
The hospitals, meanwhile, say their medical operations are running normally despite the walkout. They have brought on thousands of temporary nurses to fill shifts and say they’ve made financial commitments to extend their employment.
“Everyone who has come to work — including many who have gone above and beyond to support the operational response — is helping to save lives,” Brendan Carr, CEO of Mount Sinai, said in a statement to staff Monday.
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Associated Press reporter Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this story.