Work-Bites, Steve Wishnia, January 13, 2026

The hundreds of striking nurses picketing outside NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital January 12 were loud. Their chants, cheers, and shouts resounded under the three-level bridgeway connecting the hospital’s buildings. But they weren’t talking about money.

The three main reasons almost 15,000 New York State Nurses Association members went out on strike that morning, according to the union and various nurses, are inadequate staffing, trying to preserve their health care and pensions, and gaining protections against violence on the job. The walkout, at four of New York’s wealthiest private hospitals—NewYork-Presbyterian in Washington Heights, the Montefiore complex in the Bronx, and Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Morningside and West in Manhattan—is the largest by nurses in the city’s history.

Tristan Castillo, an emergency-room nurse at Mount Sinai West on Tenth Avenue, says she and her coworkers have had to deal with as many as 14 or 15 patients at a time, when the optimum is one to four. Management is threatening to discontinue or drastically cut health benefits, according to the union, and nurses are more likely to be attacked on the job than police officers.

“Nurses have been punched in the mouth and lost teeth,” Sophie Boland, a nurse in NewYork-Presbyterian’s pediatric intensive-care unit and a member of NYSNA’s bargaining committee, told Work-Bites.

Management, meanwhile, accuses the union of being greedy. “Unfortunately, NYSNA decided to move forward with its strike while refusing to move on from its extreme economic demands, which we cannot agree to, but we are ready with 1,400 qualified and specialized nurses—and prepared to continue to provide safe patient care for as long as this strike lasts,” a Mount Sinai Hospital spokesperson said.

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