More than 10,000 nurses at two large New York City hospital systems are expected to be back on the job on Saturday after reaching a tentative agreement to end a strike that began a month ago. The New York State Nurses Association announced the deal with Montefiore, Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Morningside and West.
"For four weeks, nearly 15,000 NYSNA members held the line in the cold and in the snow for safe patient care," union President Nancy Hagans said. "Now, nurses at Montefiore and Mount Sinai systems are heading back to the bedside with our heads held high after winning fair tentative contracts that maintain enforceable safe staffing ratios, improve protections from workplace violence and maintain health benefits with no additional out-of-pocket costs for frontline nurses."
Highlights include maintaining enforceable safe staffing standards, increasing the number of nurses to improve patient care and raising salaries by 12% over the next three years.
Mount Sinai nurses currently earn an average of $162,000 annually, spokesperson Lucia Lee told the New York Times. The settlement would increase that to $275,000 over three years. At Montefiore, the union's demands eventually would raise the nurses' average base salary from about $165,000 to $220,000, according to figures provided by the hospital. Union officials disputed these figures, saying the hospitals were offering raises of only $4,500 while declining to fund health care benefits at the previous level.
The union said it expects to announce the results of the vote to ratify the agreement on Wednesday night. The strike came as members of the health care industry in New York and elsewhere are tightening their belts in advance of looming Medicaid cuts and other economic headwinds.
"The health care system is under siege financially," said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said ats the time of the strike. "The demands of the union are so outrageous" that there was no way hospitals could give in to them, he said
The only hospital system that has not yet reached a deal with its nurses is NewYork-Presbyterian. Beth Loudin, president of the hospital's local bargaining unit, said the bargaining committee rejected the deal that was on the table because it didn't offer the staffing levels the nurses were seeking and lacked proposed job protections the committee felt were needed after the hospital system announced it was laying off 2% of its workforce last May.
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