Striking NYC nurses reach tentative contract agreements at Mt. Sinai and Montefiore

Nurses have reached tentative deals on new contracts to end their strikes at hospitals run by Mount Sinai and Montefiore after nearly a month on the picketline, the New York State Nurses Association announced Monday.

Nurses must first vote on whether to ratify the tentative agreements before they can go back to work. Voting on the contracts was set to start Monday afternoon at the two hospital systems and continue through Wednesday, according to NYSNA. If the contracts are ratified, nurses will return to work by Saturday, NYSNA said.

Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian said they were still negotiating Monday morning. A spokesperson for the hospital said there was movement at the bargaining table over the weekend.

“We reached a tentative contact agreement!” announced one email sent by Mount Sinai Hospital’s nurses union executive committee at 4:45 a.m. Monday.

A Montefiore spokesperson confirmed the tentative deal. At Mount Sinai, CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a message to employees, “This process has been difficult for all of us.” He added, “I commit to you that we will heal the organization together in the service of continuing to help people to live longer and better lives.”

The new tentative contract agreements would run through 2028 and include salary boosts of 4% in March of this year and next year, as well as a 1% boost in January 2028 and a 3% boost that July, according to a fact sheet NYSNA sent to members at Mount Sinai and a copy of the tentative contract agreement with Montefiore, both of which were shared with Gothamist.

The raise of 12% over three years is lower than the 18% the nurses won in their previous contracts, which expired Dec. 31, but represents a compromise between what nurses and hospitals have been proposing at the bargaining table. NYSNA officials celebrated the tentative agreements Monday morning as a victory.

“I’m so proud of the resilience and strength of NYSNA nurses,” Pat Kane, the union’s executive director, said in a statement. “They have shown that when we fight, we win.”

Nurses also won new staffing gains, commitments to improve workplace safety and safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence, according to NYSNA and documents shared with Gothamist.

The ongoing nurses strike is the longest and largest in city history, according to NYSNA. Nearly 15,000 nurses walked off the job on Jan. 12, picketing in the freezing cold as negotiations dragged on.

Hospital leaders have insisted throughout the strike that they have been able to continue to provide largely uninterrupted, high-quality patient care with the help of temporary replacement nurses, some of whom earned nearly $10,000 a week to work during the strike. But some patients at the affected hospital systems have told Gothamist the strike has resulted in postponed surgeries and missed appointments, and that they don’t have the same level of confidence in the visiting nurses.

Here are some of the key points in the contracts that could end the strike at Montefiore and Mount Sinai.

Staffing Deals

Nurses on the picket lines have said one of their key concerns is being stretched too thin because of understaffing, which they said puts patients at risk.

Some nurses told Gothamist that conditions improved somewhat after they won new staffing standards in their previous contracts, along with the ability to get hospitals to pay fines if they didn’t adhere to those standards — but they said understaffing in some units remained a problem.

Montefiore’s new tentative agreement includes commitments to put in place lower nurse-to-patient ratios in several areas of the hospital and to create new nursing positions to help reduce patient wait times, NYSNA said in an email over the weekend.

For the first time, Montefiore is also committing to a safe staffing standard in an outpatient unit, the union said.

Mount Sinai Hospital has agreed to deadlines for hiring new full-time employees and creating new positions in various hospital units, according to the fact sheet NYSNA sent to nurses at the hospital.

Artificial Intelligence

Nurses have said in recent weeks they’re alarmed by how quickly hospitals are adopting artificial intelligence to assist with different aspects of patient care and are concerned the technology could introduce errors.

The tentative agreement with Montefiore specifies that employees will be allowed to use their clinical judgment to override patient care decisions supplied to them by AI or machine learning.

The Mount Sinai Hospital agreement says AI will be used to support nurses and the hospital will notify the union before rolling out new technology that affects nurses’ practices, according to the fact sheet shared with Gothamist.

Workplace Safety

Nurses have been ringing alarm bells about the risk of violence in hospitals, citing recent incidents at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital last month and Mount Sinai Hospital in November.

The tentative agreement with Montefiore says the hospital system will start screening for weapons at the entrances of facilities where the protocol is not already in place, while maintaining the practice at other locations.

The agreement also affords employees time off to attend court proceedings if they’ve been assaulted at work.

The Mount Sinai fact sheet says nurses will get similar time off for court proceedings and that new weapons detectors will be installed by the end of this year.

This story has been updated with additional details.