INTERVIEW
Regional Labor Review (Spring/Summer 2026)
How 15,000 Nurses Struck NYC Hospitals for Weeks and Won: A Conversation with NYSNA Activist Beth Loudin By Gregory DeFreitas
In the first two frigid months of 2026, 15,000 nurses marched picket lines in the largest nursing strike in New York City history. Members of the NY State Nurses’ Association (NYSNA) had fought for months to bring management to the bargaining table at three huge private hospital systems: Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NY Presbyterian/Columbia (NYP). Chief among several major issues were improved nurse-to-patient staffing ratios to cut overcrowding and defuse sometimes violent ER patient-staff interactions and stronger layoff protections. After a three-day strike in 2023, the hospitals’ management quickly conceded to higher staffing ratios and an enforcement mechanism in which arbitrators could fine hospitals guilty of sub-par ratios. As a result, for example, since early 2024 arbitrators have forced Mt. Sinai to pay its nurses over $6 million in fines. 1 The hospitals protested these increased costs and took steps in 2025 to better withstand another, possibly longer strike. An important aid in their efforts came from NY Governor Kathy Hochul (Dem) who signed executive orders that allowed the hospitals to temporarily replace strikers with high-paid “travel nurses.” After five weeks on the picket lines, Montefiore and Mt. Sinai nurses voted on February 11 to approve a mediator’s proposed new contract and return to work (on Feb. 14). Their new 3-year contracts included 12% pay hikes and safeguarded health insurance and pension benefits. Since it was not an industry-wide “master contract” (though union negotiators tried to coordinate strategy across the three hospitals), NY Presbyterian’s union executive committee refused to advise an end to their strike until a new contract included stronger language on layoff protections and expedited enforcement of penalties for hospital understaffing. One week later, with some progress on those demands in hand (along with the pay and benefits wins of the other hospitals), NYP workers voted to end their strike. Beth Loudin, a neonatal nurse at NY Presbyterian, is a rank-and-file activist who became a leading member of its union executive committee. In early June, Gregory DeFreitas spoke with her about the historic strike.
January 2026 nurses picket line at Mt. Sinai West, Manhattan. Photo credit: Regional Labor Review
Q: What were the main issues that drove so many nurses to risk so much and go on strike for 6 weeks? BL: We were all aware, both sides of the table, that our contracts expired at the end of the year, December 31st. This was our second round of doing coordinated bargaining. That is, we weren't bargaining all at a big table. But we were bargaining in coordination, tightly, our side, all the different nursing tables talking to each other. But what became very clear is that all the management side of the tables were in tight lockstep as well. In our last round of bargaining in 2022, we had also set the guideline that we would be bargaining, with a hard end date at expiration. So, we maintained that strategy for this round. Every person involved in this bargaining knew that December 31st was our deadline. We at New York Presbyterian, got to the table first in August, so we were very clear we wanted to get started early.
There was no goal to say we must strike, even though management thinks that that was our only goal. We had our platform out to our, you know, we did all the steps in escalation, so we had our platform pretty clear from the jump that this is about:
Safe staffing; it's always going to be about safe staffing,
Maintaining health and pension benefits.
Providing safety at the workplace from workplace violence.
Restricting ICE raids on immigrant patients and staff in the hospitals
Layoff protections, especially at New York Presbyterian specifically, because they had taken advantage of the federal chaos, and laid off 2% of our workforce the previous 6 to 8 months.
We do have, you know, committees set up that we can evaluate and have a voice at the table if they were going to introduce anything new like that. They're supposed to respect our perspective if they do choose to, investigate if they wanted to bring in any new AI technology. We were hoping to get more protective language that says there shall be no job replacement. Because looking to the, job protection language that we're looking for across the board, We wanted to have that as well, but we did not quite achieve that. But we hope that, through at least the collective power that folks have really felt now, that there can be organizing and collective power through kind of the softer things like committees and internal pressure.
Beth Loudin. Photo credit: NYSNA
Q: In the unions’ early negotiating efforts in 2025, how did you manage to organize so many staff into “contract action teams” (C.A.T.s)? BL: Yeah, I would say, especially from our perspective at the New York Presbyterian table, we… I think the story isn't complete without reflecting on 2022-2023, because Montefiore and Mount Sinai went on strike. We did not go on a strike [at NYP], and our nurses were really angry about that.
They were ready to, since we were treated so poorly during COVID. It just felt like that was the time to demand more. We did get the highest raises we've ever gotten, but, like, there was just so much more that they felt, needed to be done. So there was a lot of anger to organize with, to be honest, and one big thing that we recognized that, was not done well the prior round, was relationship building and establishing that the nurses that were at the bargaining table are the face of this whole campaign. We're the executive committee, so each member of the executive committee, we broke up units. We each covered a handful of units that kind of made sense geographically, or service line. For example, one of our pediatric ICU nurses took all the pediatric ICUs. And then it was your job as an executive committee member to then make sure you know most people on your assigned units, and then over the past 3 years work to identify who these contract action team leaders were. So it wasn't an overnight thing, obviously. And it was a very intentional adjustment that we've made, that this should be member-driven, this requires constant communication and trust. And so we were deeply organizing for two and a half years prior to this, based on what we learned. So the contract action team took time to develop, and some units have long-term established folks, some were the people that were the most angry from the last round, and some people were new to the scene and wanted to get more involved. I will say that we had at least one per unit per shift. The titles we cover are just nurses and nurse practitioners. So title-wise, generally, if the NPs had their leaders of their unit, and then the nurses had their leaders of their unit, there could be some mishmashing around titles. But overall, one person per unit per shift. On the floor, we aimed for 1 to 10 ratio of leaders to shift staff. We were definitely up to 2 per unit per shift, but by the time we went on strike, our contract action team, or our strike captains, tripled in size, because obviously you need a lot more you know, boots on the ground, or people really coordinating with each other closely. Q: About the strike itself, when it started Governor Hochul approved the hospitals hiring high-paid, temporary “traveling nurses.” Did many nurses voice fears that they might, in fact, be permanently laid off if they went on strike? BL: We didn't have that fear initially, because even though I know, with the Trump environment, things aren't by the book, we made sure that we were on a ULP strike (Unfair Labor Practice, under the 1935 NLRA). So we had filed a handful of unfair labor practices in order to make sure we were technically protected under the law. And so, we educated deeply around that, And then the flip side of it: saying, this is necessary in order to gain more language to protect us in the future. I will say, I don't know if it made it out (publically), but, we were threatened with, impasse and permanent replacements later on in the game. So that was a real fear we had to actually face head on that was being talked
about. I do think it was a fear tactic rather than actually something that our employer was going to do. But that did change a lot of what, the end looked like for us. Q: Was that only with respect to New York Presbyterian, after you guys resisted the first agreement? BL: No, that was, probably about a week before the mediated settlement, or a couple days before the master mediated settlement came out. It was allegedly an attempt by the powers that be to really make us all slim down our top priorities. Basically, the narrative that we received at the table was that the way to avoid impasse is bargaining, and so what we want to do is slim down to our top, top, top things that we need in order to go back to work. And that was a really, you know, painful and difficult moment of trying to balance. We've been out for 20-plus days at that point. And trying to make the best decision for our bargaining unit members. You know, avoiding replacement and that sort of thing, but at the same time, not cutting everything. So anyway, it was a moment where we did slim down quite a bit from our proposals. I think something that we really tried to avoid the whole period was bargaining against ourselves, but it was very difficult because the 6 months of bargaining prior to the strike was all the boss saying: “No, no, no,” or “We'll get back to you”. There hadn't been really much back and forth about anything. So we had still a lot on the table when we went out. Therefore, we did have to bargain against ourselves at the end there, and try to maintain a lot of our gains historically, but make some progress where we could. Q: Looking back, what would you say about the role of community groups, of other unions, and of politicians like Hochul and Mayor Mondani and Senator Bernie Sanders? What would you say about their role contributing to or obstructing the strike success? BL: I think the labor movement in general I hope is moving in a direction right now, that you're seeing so many sites like ours that say: wow, we haven't struck in 30 years. So what happened in the past 30 years to put us in a moment when nobody was striking, and there was a little bit more hesitancy to go out -- a lack of militancy. So I will say, like, I think each union has its own identity, and that we are all trying to build more militant, fighting unions. As far as the labor movement and all the unions in New York, we were getting a lot of support on paper, and we had a lot of rank-and-file members coming out to the line. It was something we had to agitate around, the people that did come to support our picket lines didn't really know a lot about what was going on. And so I think we had to push a lot to actually get some more formal, like feedback to the leaders of all the different unions that we really do need turnout. We need people to see that visually, we have support as well. We did have people turning out, especially the Teamsters from, the Amazon union. They came out really big. They brought the Fat Cat, the pig smoking a cigar and that sort of thing [inflatable characters]. And we did get a scabby at every line donated by unions, so, like, there was good visuals from different folks there.
But I do think there's something to be said that there is a lot of growth to happen in the labor movement to really beef up picket lines and provide a lot more support. I know the nurses learned a lot from this. There have been a couple strikes since ours in New York City, and people are asking: “How can we go out? Where are we going? You know, so there is this newfound inclination to support workers. As for community groups, it is a gap that we need to fill more over the next few years. We have some connections. there are times where I feel like the nurses aren't able to directly communicate with the community groups. We do have a little bit of stratification and bureaucracy that we're working on. But we did have a few groups turn up for us in our neighborhood. Politically, there's different levels to it, obviously. With Hochul being the worst of them, that she decided to take-aside, period. Not really so much verbally, but through her executive order, really opening the doors, and continuing to sign it. There was a huge uproar that she had signed it, and then she shortened it to 2 weeks. It didn't really matter, because she kept extending it, even when it was only New York Presbyterian nurses still out. So that kind of showed us who was running the table. It's hard to know exactly what was going on behind the scenes with pressures on her and that sort of thing, but it was clear that she wasn't getting the narrative from the NYSNA side correct. She was really hearing out the boss more, so they won that in terms of having the ear of the governor. I will say that the rank and file story is really one that needs to be told as well, that we had a moment in the strike where it just became, like, the bargaining teams were at the table, but our rank-and-file nurses really started organizing across tables. And, you know, really making things to where one of our contract action team leaders, strike captains facilitated getting people on buses up to, Syracuse to go to the NY State Democratic Party nomination, where they were basically enshrining Hochul for another four years? So we brought the picket line to her, even though it was gonna happen regardless. Yeah, she was definitely a villain of this moment. I would say I hope she'll change, but I'm not holding my breath. Q: What would you say to Mamdani if you could talk to him about his support, or lack of support, of the strike? BL: Well, he was there on day one. He then did that event with Bernie Sanders, basically midway through. Again, I'm not sure what narrative was getting to his ears, but I would have been hopeful to correct his statement that both teams need to get back to the table. We were like: “Come on, dude, you know we're at the table! It's them, not showing up.” So that was a pretty significant stance, I think. The information that I got was that he was caring about this process, and he wanted to facilitate us all getting back to the table, after we'd been on strike for a week or so. So he was trying to offer up city-owned properties for us to meet at. But then, we ended up at the Javits Center, due to the governor, I guess. But Mamdani, you know, it’s obviously great that he showed up. But I think he could have done a lot more. I think he was just coming into his office, and I'm not gonna apologize for him, But I do know that there's a line to tow a little bit.
But I do think, he could have done a little bit more. And being said for maybe more direct communication from the nurses to these politicians or their teams to really make sure they're getting what they're on the ground really is about. Q: When Bernie Sanders came out to your picket line, he was reported to say that your hospital CEO was being paid a $26 million salary? Did that come up in the negotiations? We had so many signs about it on our lines, it came up all the time. Honestly, from looking at Steve Corwin's, level of pay: it doubled from the year before. So that says to me that he was getting bought out, because, they did install a new CEO while we were… he went active, but he had been the COO. Some think that Brian Donnelly was brought in to make us go on strike and to break the union. Because his previous role had been to, manage the Cleveland Clinic opening a private pay clinic in the UK, in their public health system. So, Artie indicates to us that, he's probably there to disrupt systems. We do know that management has had meetings for the previous two years planning about the strike, and I think Brian Donnelly coming in, also getting paid at least $10 million, has something to do with that. Q: After Mount Sinai and Monefiore workers settled, what happened do make you and your colleagues at NY Presbyterian disagree with NYSNA leadership and stay out for an extra week of strike? BL: Like I said, the baseline was that we were all bargaining at different tables, and that each table should have autonomy. We weren't negotiating a master contract. So, though we all had overall the same platform, we still had our own, bargaining unit issues. That did come down to where we were all bargaining together physically in the Javits Center, but we were still at different tables. But it came to a point where, as you could see in the mediated agreement, we really felt that we were not bargaining our contracts anymore. The boss's language all made it into this mediated settlement, but barely any gains from our perspective made it in. The thing that made it a little bit different for NYP versus the Sinai and Montie tables is that they had been making a little bit of progress over the prior couple days. They had started to talk about staffing and where exactly they needed improvements. And they had signed off on a few more of the top issues. So we had everything outstanding, and they had knocked some stuff off. So then it came down to, here's this big mediated agreement, you guys all need to be happy with it. And of course, they're playing a power move, too. It helps everybody if we all go back together. It is terrifying if you're left alone, and we've been telling our members, 15,000 nurses strong, and then we go down to 4,400 nurses strong (at NYP alone). For us, the key disagreement was that we still had ground to make up for. We hadn't actually bargained with the boss and gotten a lot off the table, so we had a lot that we needed in order to return. The key things being staffing. Like I said, we got a certain number of FTEs, which is nurses positions, but it wasn't a ton that we could make sure we covered everything that we needed, that we had identified as units needing help. And the
second, largest part being job protection. Workplace violence, we had made some progress on, getting language that we were pretty close on signing off with management. It wasn't anything, like, groundbreaking, but it was pretty much finished. But the two huge sticking points for us were job security and staffing. So we were the only ones to kind of draw the line and say: “We didn't get enough.” To Montefiore Nurses' defense, the only thing left on their table really was money. Their boss had really buckled the day before about staffing ratios and improvements to those ratios. And then the Mount Sinai table had kind of identified exactly which units were going to get help. The thing that really drove them to say, okay, we need to sign this for Mount Sinai, was that Days prior to the start of the strike, Mount Sinai had, in our eyes, illegally terminated some nurses in the labor and delivery department. And it was part of the bargaining team's priorities to make sure these nurses, came back. The settlement they got was that they would do expedited arbitration so that they were able to at least get their case heard quickly.So that wa s enough for them to sign. So, it was a very difficult decision, but it was one that we stood our ground for, saying we didn't get enough. Staffing-wise, we knew that management would rather put those all into what we call the float pool, which is nurses that can work anywhere in the hospital, based on specialty. But, rather than using them to improve grids, (our staffing guidelines for each unit). So, that was a gap, and then job security, we really hadn't gained anything, and that was a key tenet of what we needed to go back. What transpired between us and our top union leadership played out very publicly, so I don't feel too badly about sharing it. The decision of our bargaining team -- who has been organizing for 3 years and knew our nurses really well – was not trusted. The statewide NYSNA leadership painted us to be crazy. I think a lot of pressure had been done behind the scenes to get this mediated settlement done, from all sides of the table, the mediator, the NYSNA executive, and the hospital executive. So maybe it was over-promised that this deal would have flown through and everything should be fine. So when it didn't happen, that was a big problem for the NYSNA executive side. So, there was a decision made at the executive level, statewide, to just say: “Oh, we're just going to be democratic, and we're gonna send it to the nurses to vote.” I'm not sure I've ever heard of that within NYSNA. The more I talk about it to different people in different unions, I'm hearing that maybe it does happen, in this country, but I think it's helpful to talk about it more so that people do know that it could be a possibility and how to avoid it. So, they… Q: You and many of your NYP colleagues marched on, NYSNA's Midtown headquarters, and brought the top leaders a petition? Did they ever respond to the petition?
BL: Yeah, the petition was to do a formal investigation into the actions, and the decisions made. I think, you know, purposefully, we all see it in contracts and bylaws and this sort of thing. Sometimes things are vague on purpose, and so the provisions that we were citing are vague enough to where the people that are investigating are the people that made decisions. So they're all together. The only response we got from the petition was: yes, we'll do the investigation. And then the investigation didn't bring about anything. Q: What about the final contract ? What do you think were the wins and the limitations of it, looking back? BL: I mean, the biggest win is that the hospital tried to crush the workers, and the workers were not crushed. So, that's number one. I know it's not, you know, contractual language, but it was a power struggle, and the nurses did not bow down to the boss. But the actual contractual wins, they were first our healthcare. They were really trying to make us pay for our healthcare. This gets a little nitty-gritty, but our healthcare coverage is such that we're not deciding the coverage, we're just deciding if we pay for it or not. But there was also a game being played about, the trustee level of the health fund was not setting rates, and if the health fund doesn't set rates and we just put in some money, the hospital will then have the ammo to change our benefits. We got an agreement that there's no way that they can diminish our benefits, so that was a huge and necessary win that took 2 weeks of being on strike. The other wins that we got were mainly about progress, not perfection, which is hard to tell people after being on strike for 42 days. That's really what it amounted to in the end of the day. We were able to secure the immediate staffing upgrades for our emergency rooms, which were the, you know, most in dire need. And then the commitment to meet and discuss for the next 60 days of where else we were going to improve staffing. We now have gotten to an agreement somehow. And we did get our priority units covered. That's been a, breath of fresh air. Job security-wise, the provision that we got is pretty specific, we did update how many years of service are needed till you cannot be laid off. Another provision is that if you've been here a certain amount of years, that if they lay off… our big concern was our advanced practice nurses, and we think they target them because they can replace them with Columbia University, which they have. Historically. And we think that's a financial decision above all else. So the provision we have is that if they choose to close a service, and you are of the protected class, then you get to maintain your salary forever. So if they are trying to make a financial decision, we hope that, by borrowing them from actually saving any money, because these individuals will stay paid.
On workplace violence, we got a commitment to really identify and discuss what protective measures, specifically, weapons detection and panic alarms on badges, and expanding our behavioral emergency response team -- all of those are necessary, and had been started. But they needed to have a little bit of extra push to make sure we were getting what we wanted out of it. Q: Do you think that the final contract made any progress on one of the early demands that, if anybody's injured in workplace violence, that the time won't be reduced from your paid sick time? BL: Yeah, that was still there to the very end of negotiations, but did not make it. We do know now, I've been talking to union members for a lot, you know, this has brought me closer to the country-wide fight, that I do know that they achieved that, I think, in Illinois, so I do think the door is open. So we have hope that we can get there, but we didn’t get there this time. Q: Okay, and did you get expedited arbitration, in terms of your staffing ratios? BL: Yes. Our main issue is scheduling. We were able to get cases through, but it was very slow due to arbitration scheduling, and so what we did get is there will be a date every other month for an arbitrator, so it will be on the schedule and available. And the hospital and us have to accept that date. We'll give us, like, 3 or 4 dates for the month, and we all have to have at least one. Though it's not as prescriptive as we were hoping for, and we were hoping for it to mimic the Montie and Mount Sinai language they won in 2022-23, we did make some progress on that that we were grateful for. And that came after the extra week of strike that wasn't on the table prior. So that was a victory, for sure. Q: One last question: looking back 3 months since the strike ended, from a rank-and-file perspective, what do you think about the possible significance of this strike for labor going forward? After all, healthcare and education are the biggest sectors in the nation’s biggest city. And 15,000 nurses in that city and sector went on strike in really, really frigid conditions for a long time. Do you think that has broader significance? BL: I hope so. I think it shows that you can do it. It can be done. It is brutal. I don't think anybody should diminish that the conditions were hard outside, you know, they cut off our health insurance, like, people were having babies, accidents. Family members dying. Like, real tragedies occurred during the strike. But that didn't push nurses to then say, I must cross the picket line, or I must do anything. It actually dug in a lot of nurses, saying, like, this is… I'm going through something terrible, but I would never, you know, abandon my coworkers, and this makes our fight even more important. So, a lot of bravery, a lot of, sacrifice. And, you know, solidarity and a lot of lessons learned. A lot of nurses were really… their eyes were opened to the, you know, powers of a corporate boss. You think you're working for a healthcare system that's there to care for patients, and then when you get told that you're not worth
anything, and they'd rather put you outside than meet some demands, even small demands, then that really… that really changes your narrative. And it was from people who used to do the most, like, above and beyond their job, do a lot of projects on the units, do, everybody else's job for them. They really championed the hospital in a public image perspective, a lot of folks really were grappling with the idea that, like: I do care for my patients, and I care about my job. But that's not intertwined with the name of the hospital at this point, the corporation, and just a lot of identity in being a worker. I'm not an NYP nurse, I'm a union nurse, that works at NYP. And like I said before, I hope that tidal waves of nurses are now going to be out there supporting any worker that, is going through the same thing. Solidarity is how we build And we are networking and trying to get our stories out there, so that workers know that they can do this. I do think people were inspired by our fight, at least they told me they were. Interestingly, within our New York Presbyterian NYSNA, we have 3 contracts being negotiated this year in the different systems. We're also directly communicating with nurses that are going to deal with the same boss and same conditions. So, the networks we've been building for us are also crucial to making sure that the nurses and workers in general fight the good fight.
February 2026 nurses picket line at Mt. Sinai West, Manhattan. Photo credit: Regional Labor Review
Gregory DeFreitas is a Professor of Economics at Hofstra University and Director, Center for the Study of Labor & Democracy. REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 28, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2026). © 2026 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University.
NOTES 1
Goldstein, Joseph, “Nurses at 4 NYC Hospitals Vote to End Strike, But It Continues at One,” NY Times (2/11/2026).