Nurses from one of the city’s largest hospitals, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, hand-delivered a letter to the union’s office last week, demanding Ms. Hagans’s removal as president of the New York State Nurses Association, according to one of the leaders of the union’s chapter at the hospital, Cagatay Celik. The letter was first reported by The City, an online news outlet.The dispute stems from the statewide union taking the pact directly to nurses and bypassing the nurse leaders at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, who had opposed the deal a mediator had offered to end the strike.

Would there be a nurses strike at the end of every three-year contract?

“It’s not a decision to be taken lightly, and one where the consequences of doing it and staying out for a long time could be catastrophic,” he said, noting the results of a five-year strike by Spectrum cable and internet workers in New York City that resulted in decertification of the union.

Jason Ortiz, a political operative who was once the political director of a labor union, the New York Hotel Trades Council, said that he couldn’t recall any other union in New York that had led its members on two major strikes in such a short period.“That was a very, very risky and very, very courageous move,” he said.Striking workers, he said, couldn’t depend on protections from the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that has been largely sidelined.

“We know that for many, missing another paycheck and going without health care coverage is not an option you and your families can afford,” the hospital wrote in an email Friday.

About 10,000 nurses began returning to work this past weekend at Montefiore in the Bronx and across three hospitals in the Mount Sinai Health System. But more than 4,000 nurses remained on strike in Upper Manhattan, outside NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia.

did not include sufficient protections against layoffs, nor did it add enough nurses in understaffed units.

t was only after four weeks that a deal began to take shape, after the mediators put forward a proposal

And last week, after having gone on strike for the second time in three years,

hospitals were better prepared than in 2023

But this winter’s walkout had been a far bigger gamble, with far less upside and considerably more peril.

But a rift has emerged among the union’s leaders as workers at four hospitals are back on the job, while a walkout persists at a fifth hospital.

2 Strikes in 3 Years