The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) spoke to a medical tech at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital about the ongoing strike of nurses at the facility and three other hospitals in New York. The worker, who wished to remain anonymous, described his own working and living conditions and the situation that has compelled the nurses to strike, as well as expressed his support for a united struggle of all healthcare workers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSWS: Is your salary suitable for living in one of the most expensive cities in the United States?
Worker: No! As a young person right now, the main thing I want is to be stable. That’s all I want. I want to be able to have my own place, to live and feed myself, and maybe even go out to eat one or two times a week and then go on vacation when I can afford it. Is that so much to ask for?
I know a lot of people my age that don’t have good jobs right now, that don’t really make ends meet. They’re around 25 and live in their parents’ homes. They even probably have college degrees, everything, and they can’t get a job.
WSWS: Why are the nurses on strike?
Worker: They [i.e., hospital administrators] want to do something so disrespectful. They’re just giving them a $4,000 increase in pay every year to basically cut the cost of what they will be spending on health insurance, which is like a slap in your face.
You know who owns some of the most property in New York City? It’s Columbia University, and the second one is NYU: two of the biggest hospitals in New York. Of course, they want to pay the baristas $28 to $30 an hour when a one-bedroom apartment is $2,500 a month. My parents, when they were my age, were able to afford an apartment for $700 a month.
These protests are being echoed through the whole continent, the whole world, right now. As much as it looks like we’re fighting to get paid more in nursing and everything, it’s all about the budget cuts. We all know about Trump’s “big, ugly bill,” and honestly, it’s not fair that these people are getting these cuts. All the money that was taken in the budget cuts was put into the Department of War, Homeland Security and ICE, and it’s disgusting. I’m in my early 20s and I’ve never personally felt the effects of a president’s doings as bad as it is now.
WSWS: What were your working conditions like before the strike started?
Worker: An average day would be just going through, doing about 20 of my assignments, 20 or 25. On days that we are understaffed, I do around 30 to 50. I’m okay with working more, but I need to be paid properly when I do work more. Maybe if there’s a cut in nurses, maybe the nurses that are on duty should get an increase in their pay due to the volume of work that they will need to get done, right? That’s not going to be put in place.
Every single medical technician is going crazy, working and doing more than they should be. Maybe if you hired enough medical technicians, it would be better. Maybe if you guys hired enough nurses, it would be better.
WSWS: How are conditions in the hospital right now?
Worker: Ironically, work is easier. We got less work, actually. Why is it better? Because they had to close down three units. They closed down the cardiac intensive care unit. Now that all the floors are actually properly staffed, people have less work to do.
Maybe if you pay nurses the right amount and you properly staff the floors, the whole workflow goes better. Maybe if you cut the bonuses and the cost of a lot of these people up top—maybe we should put a cap on how much these CEOs make. Management is just a puppet of the upper class.
It’s not nurses’ fault for wanting to live comfortably, because they go through stressful work environments every day.
These people are on that floor every day with these patients. They care. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t care enough. They went through school for four years or more to work here, and they paid thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands sometimes, to be in this predicament, to then be asked, “Why do you want to get paid more?”
WSWS: The New York State Nurses Association is not giving the nurses strike pay. Why is that?
Worker: Why aren’t they doing it? Because they don’t have to. At the end of the day, they have all the people under them already, and [the money] is already in their pockets. So why? Why even pay for a strike? They have to, but they don’t want to. [If they pay the nurses,] they’ll stay out for as long as they need to.
WSWS: What do the nurses need to win the strike?
Worker: Stop traffic from going there. Stop things from going up and down. They need to go harder. We all [ie., other staff at the hospitals] come out with our pickets, our posters and speakers, come in front of the hospital, surround it and demand better pay, because that will not only show the hospital that they need more, but it’ll show the world. It’ll show New York that people are going to come together to help these nurses.
The youth, the people who are unemployed, the people that are home feeling how horrible and disgusting their future is, if you guys don’t have a job, then come on, support people with jobs so they can give us more jobs.
WSWS: What do you think about organizing techs, residents, doctors and physician assistants to come out and join the nurses?
Worker: A lot of them would be willing to do that. Those nurses are very nice people. They’re very lovely individuals. I urge anybody to go over there and talk and ask questions about what’s happening. These are regular people just trying to live their lives like everybody else.
They just have to understand that we’re fighting for our future. We just want to live, make society keep going. But now we have to protest. We have to start a revolution because things aren’t right.