Striking Against the Public Safety

The reason a man in California and North Dakota should care about the New York City nurses’ walkout is that they’re next. The nurses are striking under cover of one of the most misguided laws passed by Congress or any other legislature in years. This law, legalizing strikes against non-profit hospitals, defies President Coolidge’s logic when he noted “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”Coolidge was speaking of the 1919 Boston police strike, yet his observation applies to all who work for public safety and health. The walkout by 7,000 nurses against two of Gotham’s largest hospitals poses nearly as grave a danger as a police strike. Yet Governor Hochul’s response to the nurses’ abdication of their duty in today’s labor dispute lacks the spine — or sang-froid — of Coolidge when he held fast against the striking cops. Instead, Ms. Hochul offers bromides like: “My full expectation is this will be resolved because there is no alternative.” Translation: count on the hospitals to cave to the nurses’ demands, as in the case of 9,000 other nurses in New York who threatened to strike in recent days. Ms. Hochul’s failure to intervene in the interest of public health can be explained, at least in part, by her debts to organized labor for her election victory in November.Unions provided Ms. Hochul with “turnout muscle,” Newsday reports, which “helped put her over the top in a way that county political organizations can no longer do.” The influential healthcare union, 1199/SEIU, made 70,000 phone calls to its members in the campaign’s final weekend, Newsday says, and handed out half a million leaflets. The nurses’ union that instigated the strike endorsed Ms. Hochul in April.While Ms. Hochul offers soothing words to the striking nurses, the hospitals have been thrown “into a frantic flurry to move patients, divert ambulances and scale back other services,” as the New York Times reports. One of the impacted hospitals, Montefiore, lamented that the nurses “decided to walk away from the bedsides of their patients.” Other hospitals yielded to nurses’ demands, including 19.1 percent raises over three years.It’s not our intention here to weigh in on the merit of the nurses’ demands, only to observe the danger to patients — including the most vulnerable, like newborns and their parents — when the give and take of salary negotiations escalates to the point where public health becomes a bargaining chip. That’s why, in New York at least, it was illegal for hospital workers to strike, and labor disputes had to be settled by a process of mandatory arbitration. That was superseded in 1974 by federal law allowing strikes against non-profit hospitals, sparking labor unrest. Today’s walkout, decried by Mount Sinai as “reckless,” echoes that era of strife. While Montefiore pleaded for nurses to “not abandon patients,” and intensive-care newborns were rushed to other hospitals, the nurses chanted the words from a Twisted Sister song from 1984, the AP reports: “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”The nurses’ strike marks an escalation of labor militancy at New York that bodes ill for contract negotiations in other states, especially in the public sector. What’s to stop a strike at the MTA, whose contracts expire in May? If the nurses cow New York’s hospitals, public sector unions nationwide will take notice. As Coolidge knew, taxpayers ultimately foot the bill — and don’t forget, a grateful nation put Coolidge in the White House.

Striking Against the Public Safety

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