I could hear them chanting over a block and a half away from the picket lines. Their voices rose over the apartment buildings and hospital structures, mixing with the cacophony of car, truck and bus horns as vehicles passing up and down Amsterdam Avenue, just a few blocks from where I live, honked their horns in approval of the demands and the militant picket lines they could see through their windshields at Mount Sinai Hospital, on 112th Street, New York’s Morningside Heights.
NYC nurses are striking for better staffing ratios, higher pay, improved benefits (especially healthcare), and stronger workplace violence protections. Obstacles to the settlement of the strike are the hospital's claim of financial restraints and the claimed costly changes in staffing the demands would make.
Some of the medical facilities in NYC have already settled with the NY Nurses Association. But the holdouts, among the richest and most important NYC hospitals like Mount Sinai, NY Presbyterian and Montefiore, are refusing the demands for safer staffing ratios.
The militant and large picket line here at Mt. Sinai showed the determination that overworked nursing staff have to change the daily conditions of their work. Chanting “No Contract, No Work” and “The Nurses united will never be defeated,” the preparations the nurses' union has made were evidenced by a bus parked nearby so people could take warming breaks, and plentiful food and signs at long tables stretching along the street. Red hats and red scarves was the swag everyone was wearing as they lifted their voices in unison.
The workers, 15,000 in total, are arguing that management is refusing to meet their demands in order to push back earlier victories in previous years. Of course this is what always seems to happen within capitalism. The workers fight back. If the strike is strong, the bosses accede to their demands. Then, later, piece by piece the workers' victories are whittled down. There are so many problems with medical care in the United States it's hard to begin. But let's start with the fact that millions of workers are uninsured and that the system of subsidized health care has people facing rising premiums they can’t afford. In a communist society, health care will be for all and the profits of insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies will disappear. Those dollars will go into extending the care available to all. The Progressive Labor Party is a revolutionary party that fights for another world that is possible, a world where the working class, the nurses this article describes and everyone else, will have the power to create a society with no bosses that cares for people.
