On January 12, 2026, 15,000 private-sector nurses walked off the job, marking the largest healthcare strike New York City has ever seen.
Organized by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), nurses demanded what should be an established baseline: safe staffing, fair wages, full healthcare coverage and pensions, benefits for retired nurses aged 60 to 65, and safer workplaces. Eight out of ten nurses experience workplace violence, as well as high levels of burnout, and face retaliation from management for speaking out. The strike exposes a healthcare system designed to maximize profits at the expense of patients and workers alike.
Hospital management has rejected the nurses’ every demand. Their counteroffer of a token annual sum of $4,500 per nurse—$375 per month—represents a fraction of skyrocketing healthcare costs. Meanwhile, the hospitals are spending over $100 million on “temporary replacement nurses.”
Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, the hospital sector’s top lobbying group in Albany, told The New York Times, “The demands of the union are so outrageous that there is no way [the hospital owners] can concede.” Yet across these systems, six-figure travel perks and tens of millions in executive pay starkly contrast with claims that nurses’ demands are “unaffordable.” Nurses can only dream of eating in the expensive restaurants that people like Raske dine in on a regular basis.
The hospitals are really just capitalist big businesses, intimately linked with the real estate, banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical machine industries. The numbers reveal the real priorities: New York Presbyterian reported over $10.6 billion in revenue, $10.1 billion in expenses, $22 billion in assets, and $64.5 million in executive pay, including CEO Steven Corwin at $23.3 million, plus first-class and charter travel for top staff.
Mount Sinai reported $4.65 billion in revenue, $4.54 billion in expenses, $5.9 billion in assets, and over $10 million in executive pay, while Montefiore reported $5 billion in revenue and expenses with $4.6 billion in assets. This is the outrageous reality of healthcare under capitalism: wealth is hoarded at the top and workers are overburdened, while patients suffer.
Nurses are demanding what should be an established baseline: safe staffing, fair wages, full healthcare coverage and pensions, and safer workplaces. / Image: NYSNA, Facebook
Nurses across both private- and public-sector hospitals are represented by NYSNA, but their contracts at each hospital are structured to expire at different times. This benefits the bosses by allowing them to offer contrasting concessions with nurses at each hospital and it mitigates the risk of all hospitals going on strike at once.
Currently, striking hospitals are circumventing the picket line by sending their patients to unaffected hospitals. This weakens the strike by causing nurses within the same organization to effectively scab on each other. This is a classic divide-and-rule tactic that bosses have been using for a very long time, going back at least to the New Orleans general strike of 1892.
Predictably, hospital executives have taken to the media to smear and attack the striking workers. Joe Solmonese, Montefiore’s senior VP of strategic communications, called NYSNA’s demands “reckless and irresponsible.” A representative of New York Presbyterian stated that, “while NYSNA has told nurses to walk away from the bedside, we remain focused on our patients and their care.”
But it is the capitalists who do not care for their patients or their nurses. On January 8, a patient who was admitted to NYP-Brooklyn Methodist Hospital for evaluation of stroke symptoms, was suffering distress and engaging in self-harm. Mental states such as agitation and confusion are common symptoms of neurological events, and the family told New York Daily News the patient had no history of mental illness. When hospital staff and security were unable to deescalate the situation, the NYPD was called. They responded by shooting and killing the patient, who had barricaded himself in his room with another patient.
This tragic event could have been avoided if management had addressed nurses’ constant complaints over workplace safety and staffing concerns. As one ICU nurse said, “It’s crazy. The whole system is all broken. The hospital systems are broken. They just care about their pockets and their stockholders.”
Another tragic irony is that management is threatening to cut NYSNA’s healthcare benefits. Nurses provide healthcare to everyone, but the bosses don’t believe caregivers themselves deserve high-quality coverage. The only way workers can protect their wages and benefits is by withholding their labor. Cutting health benefits leaves nurses no other choice but to put up a picket line. If anyone is to blame for being “reckless and irresponsible” towards patients, it is management.
The first thing that can be done to strengthen the strike is to bring all NYSNA nurses into the struggle. / Image: NYSNA, Facebook
The point of a strike is to shut down the production of goods and services. If business continues to operate around the strike, the strike is ineffective. The first thing that can be done to strengthen the strike is to bring all NYSNA nurses into the struggle. “An injury to one is an injury to all!” used to be the rallying cry of the labor movement, and it must become so again.
The reactionary Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 as a reaction to the massive strike wave of 1945–46, outlaws “solidarity strikes”—one of the most effective tools of working-class struggle. This must be defied if the labor movement is to become strong again. But it must not stop there. Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order to allow the big healthcare executives to hire strikebreakers from across the country who are not licensed in New York to cross the picket line.
The union leadership must not allow strikebreakers to enter the hospitals. They should form hard pickets in front of the entrances and appeal politically to non-union nurses. They should explain that they are fighting for higher wages, healthcare and other benefits, and better safety conditions, and if the non-union nurses joined the pickets, they could all win these things collectively!
The nurses could also appeal to the broader labor movement for help. They should start with other hospital workers. They must form industry-wide demands, with workers in unions like SEIU Local 1199 demanding their present contracts be improved. Workers must not accept “the rules” made by the bosses for their own benefit.
Other workers could also join the effort. The building trades unions perform a lot of work in the hospitals. If they refuse to work at these sites and instead join the pickets until every demand is met, this will put enormous pressure on the bosses to concede. An appeal to the Transport Workers Union could effectively paralyze the city by shutting down the subways and buses. This is how a powerful labor movement can be built that would strike fear into the hearts of NYC’s elites. If workers can shut down day-to-day operations of essential services, who really runs the city?
The strike should also connect with the movement against ICE, which is terrorizing undocumented workers and US citizens all over the country. The recent murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis has sparked large protests in many cities. Only the working class can stop ICE with its power to bring society to a screeching halt. If these movements can be linked and continue to grow, no force on Earth can stop it.