The Rev. Al Sharpton joined nurses in rallying outside Mount Sinai Morningside in Manhattan as the largest nurses strike in New York City history entered its second week on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“How can you spend King Day and turn your back on people that are working and not insured right, and not given the right wages, and not given the right respect, when they’re taking care of our afflicted, our ill, our infirm,” said Sharpton. “In the name of Martin Luther King, I join the nurses in demanding justice.”
Some 200 striking nurses formed a picket line in the bitter cold outside the Amsterdam Ave. medical center near W. 114th St. to demand increased wages and better working conditions — including protections to ensure hospitals cannot overwhelm their nurses with patients.
“Our ERs are so overcrowded and our patient-to-nurse ratio is off the charts,” said 31-year-old Dalia Ampiah, an ER nurse at Montefiore in the Bronx. “It’s so crowded. It’s almost impossible to keep up.”
Hospitals have been scrambling to make do despite severe staffing shortages as negotiators fail to make any progress towards a short-term agreement, Mount Sinai CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a letter to hospital staff on Monday.
“As of today, despite our best efforts to negotiate, a near-term path to an agreement is very unlikely,” Mount Sinai Health System CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a letter to hospital staff on Monday. “Our negotiating teams met with NYSNA’s negotiating teams on Friday. After little progress was made at either table, the mediators told the parties to break.”
The hospitals affected by the strike, which are private, not-for-profit institutions, have responded by hiring more than a thousand temporary nurses, the Associated Press reported.
“If you can afford $100 million on contract nurses to do the work we do day in and day out, you can afford a fair contract,” said NY State Nurses Association president Nancy Hagans.
The strike has seen nearly 15,000 nurses from 12 city hospitals walk off the job since last Monday.
Nurses say they’re willing to go the distance to protect themselves and patients.
“We’re here for our patient safety, our health insurance and our pensions,” said Mount Sinai nurse, Lorriann Alexander, 42. “They’ve given us nothing. We’re still waiting for an answer. We’ll wait for as long as it takes.”
