Chants of “Kathy Hochul, shame on you” and “vote her out” rang out in Midtown on Feb. 2 as a sea of nurses clad in red marched from Grand Central Terminal to the governor’s Manhattan office to demand that Governor Kathy Hochul aid the nearly 15,000 nurses on strike in New York City.
Hundreds of members of the New York State Nurses Association joined the march, not officially endorsed by the union, in freezing weather, complete with plenty of noisemakers and two nurses dressed up as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as the union enters its fourth week striking at three major private hospital systems in the city: Mount Sinai, Montefiore and NewYork-Presbyterian.
Nurses stopped in front of the governor’s office and delivered a letter to a Hochul aide as they demanded Hochul stop extending an executive order allowing out-of-state clinicians to work in Manhattan, the Bronx, Nassau County and neighboring counties, making room for hospitals to replace striking nurses. Hochul first issued the order, Executive Order 56, on Jan. 9, just before the strike, declaring a state disaster emergency due to imminent “severe staffing shortages.”…