Even as 7,000 nurses return to work at two of New York's busiest hospitals after a three-day strike, colleagues around the country say it's just a matter of time before frontline workers at other hospitals begin walking the picket line.
Problems are mounting at hospitals across the nation as they try to deal with widespread staffing shortages, overworked nurses beaten down by the pandemic and a busted pipeline of new nurses.
That's led to nurses juggling dangerously high caseloads, said Michelle Collins, dean at the college of nursing and health at Loyola University New Orleans.
"There's no place that's immune from what's happening with the nursing shortage," Collins said. "It's everywhere."
Union leaders say the tentative contract agreement ending the strike by nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, each privately owned, nonprofit hospitals that hold over 1,000 beds in New York City, will relieve chronic short staffing and boost pay by 19 per cent over three years.
The walkout, which ended Thursday, was just the latest dispute between nurses and their employers.
Last year, six unions representing a total of 32,000 nurses launched strikes outside of hospital systems around the country, according to the Bureau of Labour and Statistics. Those strikes represented about a quarter of all the major strikes in the US last year, an increase from the year before.
Describing hospital environments where nurses are unable to take breaks because they are assigned too many patients — some of whom are pleading for care from frontline workers — the president of the American Nurses Association, Dr Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, said some nurses may think their only option is to strike.
"Nurses don't feel like their voices have been heard with this exact topic," she told The Associated Press Wednesday.
In California, nurse unions at two hospitals are likely to strike this year when their contract expires, said former nurse Peter Sidhu, who now works for the state union. Sidhu, who fields objections from nurses across the state who say their caseloads are unsafe, has received 7,000 such complaints in Los Angeles County hospitals since December. He said objections have at least doubled since before the pandemic began.