The New York City nursing strike entered its third week on Monday. Nearly 15,000 nurses are on the picket lines from across the city’s largest hospitals — Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian, all represented by the New York State Nurses Association — making it the largest strike in city history. And New Yorkers are facing the consequences. 

This is not just a labor dispute but a public health issue that affects everyone living in the city. City government and hospital leaders cannot continue treating this strike as an inconvenience in their day-to-day lives, but handle it as an urgent systemic crisis that must be resolved before more lose their lives over a lack of proper care.

While hospital executives criticise the nurses’ demands as “unreasonable” and reduce its central focus to unfair wages, that’s not exactly the case here. A major point of contention is the unsafe staffing ratios — up to eight patients per nurse, when the ratio should be closer to 4-to-1 — that many nurses endure on a daily basis. Current patient loads are too high for them to handle, leaving patients to suffer the consequences. Chronic understaffing is not just an accident, but a choice made by the hospital systems seeking higher net profit, over proper patient care. 

Media reduction of the strike to merely an issue of wages dismisses the serious warnings by nurses without offering any solutions. As the union and the hospitals begin to form settlements in regards to nurse salary increases, it is clear that the focus of the strike is instead with the union’s nonnegotiable issues: staffing and safety. 

With the high volume of patients, many nurses are faced with exhaustion and burnout, as well as physical safety concerns that come with working in a public-facing position within a hospital. Demands for reducing nurse to patient ratios are not there because nurses are asking for an easier job — they are in place to create conditions that make safe care possible and safe working environments a reality.

It is critical that both groups can find a contract solution as soon as possible. New York cannot in good faith continue to rely on the goodwill of its nursing community to prop up the system that is actively failing them. These essential workers are already highly overworked, which can lead to risks for patients in regards to medication errors, delayed response teams both inside and out of the hospital rooms and longer hospital stays — while hospital employees scrounge up time to make it all work. 

Hospitals are the backbone of our society. They serve not only those who can afford the astronomical costs of health care today, but also those in low-income communities and chronically ill patients. A major concern with the nursing strike is that patients will not receive consistent care. With hospitals reliant on temporary travel scab nurses, who are hired during strikes, a chronically ill patient who might have been seeing a doctor with the same dozen nurses for his whole life may no longer receive the same level of care. If this continuity of care continues down this destructive path, it’s not the executives who suffer the consequence — it’s us. 

Hospital leadership upholds that they are committed to their quality of care by hiring travel nurses. But continuity of care is not the same as filling a timesheet — it’s if a patient feels safe and is treated by professionals who understand their backgrounds, their medical histories and their needs. Simply replacing a long-term care team with a rotating slew of temporary workers may keep a hospital functioning on the day to day, but it simply does not preserve the quality of care at each location. If the hospital executives want to treat their staff as interchangeable, they are telling us how they really see their nurses: as income, replaceable like cogs in a machine. How can these hospitals claim that care is their top priority when they cannot even place an emphasis on long-term patient relationships? 

This strike is not a one-off. For years, nurses have been asked to compensate for understaffing by working overtime hours, skipping breaks and offering emotional labor that often goes overlooked and unrecognized. This system that relies on burnout to remain operational is not a sustainable one. 

This strike is a warning of what New York City could look like if it does not care for its service workers. If hospital and city officials choose to ignore our health care workers now, they are actively choosing a system held together by burnout and emergency fixes. The end is near, as the union has already made breakthroughs on major hurdles on issues such as unfair wages, there is still much to bargain through. Nonetheless, New Yorkers deserve care and working conditions that are built on stability — not exhaustion. 

WSN’s Opinion desk strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion desk are solely the views of the writer.

Contact Annika Wilewicz at [email protected].