Health Affairs January 23, 2026
In January 2026, nearly 15,000 nurses walked off the job at some of New York City’s most prominent hospitals—Mount Sinai, Montefiore Medical Center, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia—in the largest nursing strike the city has seen in decades. The core grievances were familiar: staffing levels that nurses describe as unsafe and compensation that fails to reflect the demands of bedside care. The strike’s scale and the hospitals’ more than $100 million investment in temporary replacement staff signal that nurse strikes in 2025 and 2026 are no longer isolated labor disputes at the margins of health care delivery. They have become a systemwide safety signal—one that current policy has learned to tolerate rather than to solve.
A compilation of nursing labor actions maintained by...
Today's Sponsors
Today's Sponsor