While nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian in Manhattan continue to strike, they won a legal battle on Monday during the ongoing labor standoff.
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) said that their members at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital (CHONY) in Washington Heights won an arbitral award on Feb. 15 that exposed “chronic understaffing” in a pediatric intensive care unit.
According to NYSNA, an arbitrator found that the hospital had violated safe staffing provisions more than 600 times between Jan. 1, 2023, and May 31, 2024. As a result, the nurses received an award for nearly $400,000.
It is unclear how many NYSNA nurses were part of the settlement.
NYSNA’s legal victory comes as over 4,000 of its members enter the sixth week of NYC’s nurses strike, with safe staffing remaining a key issue in labor talks. Representatives for the union said nurses were concerned about staffing shortages in their unit, prompting them to start documenting staffing levels in 2023. An arbitrator found that the record “established a perceived pattern of violations,” leading to the nurses’ win.
“While the financial remedies are nice, what we really want is more nurses and a contract that makes it harder for the hospital to avoid taking accountability,” said Sophie Boland, a registered nurse at CHONY. “That’s why we’re on strike.”
Despite the victory, NYSNA reps said the hospital is appealing in federal court.
“It shouldn’t take years to get an acknowledgement of the conditions we’ve worked under when NewYork-Presbyterian could just do the right thing and safely staff the hospital,” Boland said.
A spokesperson for NewYork-Presbyterian said in response to amNewYork’s inquiry about the case that safe staffing is “always a priority and an essential aspect of delivering outstanding patient care” at the hospital.
“Post-pandemic, we have filled vacancies and grown our nursing teams,” the spokesperson said. “We proactively hired more than 400 new nurses over the last three years alone at our Columbia hospitals and have proposed hiring more.”
Meanwhile, NewYork-Presbyterian nurses entered day 37 of the city’s nurses strike on Tuesday. The strike began on Jan. 12, nearly two weeks after the nurses’ contract expired on Dec. 31, 2025.
Over 10,000 NYSNA nurses from Montefiore and Mount Sinai were part of the strike until they reached agreements with management at their respective hospitals and returned to work on Feb. 14.
Although a deal to end the strike was on the horizon at NewYork-Presbyterian last week, NYSNA nurses at the hospital ultimately voted down a mediator’s proposal that they said “failed to adequately address” their staffing concerns.
New bargaining dates have not yet been set between NYSNA and NewYork-Presbyterian.
