On the streets of New York City, ’tis the season of twinkling lights. Inside the pediatric emergency room where we work, it’s the time of coughs and high fevers.
The worst flu surge ever recorded in our state is upon us, heralded by the line of sick kids and worried parents who stream through our doors. Some we just give a little Tylenol to knock their fever down, but many need breathing treatments because the combo of influenza and winter cold has triggered their asthma. Others may require an IV to fend off dehydration. A few — children with weak immune systems, multiple organ transplants, or a history of intubations — are in real danger, and destined for the ICU. Of course, we take them all, even when we run out of blankets and, sometimes, beds.
When midnight struck last Thursday, the ball dropped in Times Square and 2026 began, that dissonance between celebration outside and struggle within our hospital’s walls took on a new dimension, as the contracts covering us and 20,000 other registered nurses expired.
This is a familiar tune, like the strains of “Auld Lang Syne.”
Three years ago, when we were just a few months into our nursing careers, NYSNA nurses at two New York City hospitals, including our own, went on strike. This was just after the COVID-19 crisis, a public health emergency where nurses around the country established without any doubt our valor and value. At least we thought we had. Local hospital leaders resisted our push for safe staffing standards and respect on the job. The resulting strike lasted three days, and led to historic contract provisions governing enforceable nurse-to-patient staffing ratios.
Now, an even larger strike looms involving up to 12 New York City hospitals. There are new issues to address, like the proper role of AI in health care, the rising threat of violence faced by health care workers, and the impact of Trump administration policies on our undocumented and transgender patients. Safe staffing and health benefits for caregivers remain top concerns.
Hospital management has made clear their aim in bargaining is not a fair compromise. They are intent on reducing the power of our collective voice. Hospital management has disciplined more than a dozen union leaders for exercising our right to talk to colleagues about our union and our right to speak about workplace violence in the press. They’ve trucked in dozens of replacement nurses at high hourly wages, forced union nurses to train our own replacements, and threatened to deduct the tens of millions of dollars they’re gearing up to spend on scabs’ wages from our contract if we strike.
Mere weeks after an armed man came to our ER intending to shoot people, hospital leaders refused to negotiate improvements in workplace safety.
They’ve also pushed to roll back the historic enforceable safe staffing protections we fought for and won when we went on strike in 2023. Those staffing enforcements work: in 2024, independent arbitrators awarded Mount Sinai nurses who worked understaffed approximately $4.7 million in financial remedies in nine separate rulings.
There’s no denying that federal Medicaid cuts present a challenge to hospitals. But the outer borough safety-net hospitals will suffer the most from these cuts, not our wealthy academic institutions. As of September 2025, Mount Sinai had more than double the cash on hand than they had in 2017, even adjusting for inflation: nearly $600 million. In the first three months of 2025, Mount Sinai Health System posted more than $1.2 billion in revenue from our hospital, a 20% increase over the same period last year. Now, Mount Sinai is planning to spend $100 million on a building dedicated to AI.
Hospitals must always look for new ways to deliver better care for more people. But guess what? Hiring enough nurses, guaranteeing nurses health benefits, and protecting us from workplace violence — these are investments too.
We’re hopeful that our hospital, and its 11 counterparts around the city, will come around to realizing that nurses and our patients are worth such an investment. Ideally, we’ll get there without us going on strike again. But if we have to strike, we will, because nurses do what it takes to protect our patients.
We will be doing it tonight, ready to wipe a nose or save a life, explain a medication or hold a hand, ever hunting for another blanket.
Carey and Murphy are members of the New York State Nurses Association and pediatric emergency room nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital. The views expressed here are their own and not those of Mount Sinai.
