After Weeks on the Picket Line, Nurses Head Back to Work

By Claudia Gohn

Shella Dominguez, a nurse at Mount Sinai Morningside, spent weeks out in the cold in front of the hospital over the past month, wearing a red New York State Nurses Association hat and marching back and forth in front of one of the entrances as she and her fellow nurses struck for better pay and working conditions.

Now, as the strike comes to an end, she’s exhausted – but also jubilant. “I was happy because we’re going back to work. I can’t wait to see our patients and our coworkers,” Dominguez recalled, describing how she felt after finding out a new contract was approved.

On February 9th, the New York State Nurses Association announced that nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai hospitals reached a tentative agreement with hospital management. This followed nearly a month of the city’s largest nurses strike on record—with more than 15,000 taking part in the job action. During these weeks, nurses showed up on the picket line in bitter cold weather (including rain, snow, and temperatures in the single digits), endured many sleepless nights due to bargaining, felt exhaustion from the endless negotiating, and pushed through any uncertainty, lifting each other up when low or in doubt. And all throughout the strike, neighbors, workplace unions, and political organizations came out to support them.

“As a nurse of Mount Sinai Morningside and West, we would like to thank our community who supported us during our strike,” said Dominguez, who works on the surgical step-down unit, caring for surgical patients who aren’t staying in the intensive care unit. “We know that you feel lost when we’re not inside the hospital taking care of your family members, friends, and neighbors inside. But we are back now.”

Even with a few days between the strike ending and going back to work, Dominguez says she wishes she had just a couple more days to rest—especially because the negotiation leg at the end was particularly exhausting, more so than even being on the picket line, according to Dominguez. “But we’ve been out for a month without a salary, so,” she points out. “It’s time for me to go back.”

After the tentative contract was agreed upon between negotiators, nurses —including those at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, which are on the same contract—needed to vote to approve this new agreement. This time was full of tension and anticipation. Ultimately, the nurses at Morningside and West voted with a 96% majority to ratify the new contract a few days later, concluding the weeks-long fight that largely preserved their current benefits while also earning new wins.

“We have a tremendous amount of nurses that wanted to ratify the contract,” Dominguez said. “We feel that our nurses are ready to go back to work with a good contract.”

Nurses interviewed by the Rag said they felt happy, and they reflected a sense of pride in their success in winning a better contract.

“I wasn’t sure at the beginning if it [strike] was something that we were capable of, but it really turned into something powerful,” said Armand Cruz, an ICU nurse at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital and one of the strike captains. “The kind of contract that our employers were trying to offer the nurses was just a visceral gutting of our healthcare benefits and our pensions, and that’s why I call [the contract] a successful defense,” said Cruz, who added: “It’s unfortunate that it took a strike to achieve that.”

The key stakes of this strike included preserving existing healthcare benefits for the nurses, creating safe and adequate staffing levels, and providing workplace-violence protections, as well as safeguards against the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace and salary increase negotiations.

The contract isn’t without compromises on the part of the nurses. One of their core demands was to hire more staff to reduce the number of patients a nurse is responsible for during a shift. (Nurses referred to this demand as “safe staffing” during the strike.)According to Cruz, the Mount Sinai Morningside and West hospitals will hire 30 full-time nurse positions between the two locations within the first year of the contract, which, he also notes, isn’t enough. While this promises an improvement, the nurses originally wanted more (and had even fought for this very demand in 2023), but they made the compromise in order to reach an agreement.

On Saturday, February 14, nurses at Mount Sinai Morningside and West went back to work. (Nurses at New York-Presbyterian hospitals are still on strike and have yet to agree on a new contract.) The nurses at Mount Sinai Morningside who spoke with West Side Rag are excited to get back to work and by their patients’ sides.

While Cruz carries some disappointment—in the fact that there had to be a strike for these benefits and that there is still a clear disconnect from those at the administrative level in hospitals—he still emphasizes his love for the work, for taking care of patients, and for his colleagues in the union who worked together to make this contract happen.

“I want people to have dignified care. I don’t want nurses not having the time and having to rush their care. We meet people in their toughest days, and the last thing they really need is a nurse that doesn’t have the time to spend the extra two seconds to hold their hand,” Cruz said.

“And what it means for my patients,” he said, “is what it’s going to mean for the people of the Upper West Side, because you guys are part of the community that we serve.”

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