Weeks after going on strike at two private hospitals in New York City, a nurses’ union is calling on the city’s public hospitals to commit to paying its members salaries comparable to what they now make in the private sector.
The New York State Nurses Association recently laid out its demand in a letter to the city’s Health + Hospitals network. It is based on contracts negotiated last month with several private hospitals that ended in pay increases and assurances of better staffing.
“If you don’t have pay parity between the private sections and the public section, we’ll never be able to attract nurses to work at H+H,” Nancy Hagans, the union’s president, told the Daily News on Wednesday.
“After our recent contract victories, the gap is about $19,000 a year,” Hagans said. “And the nurses are trained the same way, the nurses are taking care of the patients, same care, the nurses are working very hard, same education — so these nurses, we’re afraid, will leave and go into the private sector.”
Concerns over fair pay and a nurses’ exodus from the city’s public hospitals are also fueling worries that those hospitals won’t be able to maintain nurse-to-patient staffing ratios laid out in the union’s current deal with the city, Hagans said.
But the city is also contending with potentially huge budget shortfalls in the coming years. While Mayor Eric Adams voiced support for nurses who went on strike at private hospitals last month, it’s unclear how sympathetic he and his Office of Labor Relations will be to their counterparts at public hospitals given the potential fiscal crunch.
The city’s public hospital network — made up of 11 hospitals and dozens of other smaller medical facilities — largely serve the poor. Some, like Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, are the only local facilities equipped to deal with acute mental health issues or severe trauma such as gunshot or stab wounds.
Sonia Lawrence, a nurse at Lincoln for nearly three decades, said between the burnout nurses experienced during the COVID pandemic and the new contracts with private hospitals, nurses she works with are now making the decision to jump ship.
“We’re hemorrhaging nurses. On some units, in one week, we have had four nurses leave,” she said.
“We are always doing more with less. We care for all New Yorkers, regardless of their socioeconomic status, their insurance, their race, their color, their ability to pay or their immigration status. But we are exhausted,” Lawrence continued.
“Staffing has always been a problem for us,” she said. “But with the pandemic and the new contracts that have just come for our private siblings, it has escalated the situation beyond control. And now our public hospitals are in a crisis.”
Negotiations between the city’s Health + Hospitals network and the union are expected to begin next month — around the same time the union’s contract with H+H expires on March 6.
Exactly what direction those negotiations will take is not yet apparent, but in the union’s recent letter to H+H and the city’s Office of Labor Relations, NYSNA’s Executive Director Pat Kane signaled the union will rely on a currently inactive provision of the union’s current contract that’s focused on pay parity, saying that the parity issue represents “an existential crisis” for nurses.
“This provision has been suspended during the life of the agreement, which ends on March 2, 2023,” she wrote. “NYSNA intends to reactivate this.”
According to Kane’s Feb. 1 letter, many of the private hospitals that agreed to raises in the coming years are on the current contract’s “parity calculation list.”
“With these new (contract) settlements, the salary-parity gap will be over $19,000,” she wrote. “These increases are being implemented now, and every NYC H+H NYSNA nurse knows about them.”
Before the new contracts, the average pay gap between private and public hospital nurses was more than $14,000, Kane noted.
Unlike the negotiations the union had with several private hospitals last month, the upcoming contract talks with the city’s public hospital network do not carry with them the threat of a strike, given the legal prohibitions against public employees walking off the job.
That was not the case at private hospitals in January, though.
Last month, nurses at two private hospitals — at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan — walked off the job for days after negotiations ground to a halt. Talks at both hospitals eventually resumed and led to new contracts, but the relatively short strikes caused chaos, leaving patients and their families anxious about quality of care.
Throughout the strike, NYSNA received an outpouring of support — most notably from elected officials, including Mayor Adams, who said at the time that he was a “strong supporter of the nurses.”
But now that the mayor’s administration is facing its own set of demands from the union, it is uncertain how he and his team will proceed. A spokesperson from his office did not immediately respond to questions about the upcoming contract negotiations and neither did H+H.
While Adams may factor in his past support of striking nurses, he also has much broader fiscal headaches of his own to contend with. According to recent budget calculations, the city is looking at a projected budget shortfall of up to $6.5 billion in 2026.
