Hundreds of nurses, elected officials and community members turned out to rally for a second week in front of Maimonides Hospital Brooklyn and at Mt. Sinai in Upper Manhattan to protest the private hospitals opting to spend vast sums on CEO pay and AI while at the same time cutting nurse staffing.
“CEOs at Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian now make, on average, nearly 12,000 percent more than the registered nurses on the frontlines caring for patients,” according to the New York Nurses Association. “And Mount Sinai recently shelled out a whopping $100 million on just one AI facility. The bottom line: NYC’s private hospitals can afford to put patients first.”
The local bad news comes as massive healthcare cuts by the Trump administration to Medicaid and the subsidies of the Affordable Care Act will likely add a million New Yorkers to the ranks of the uninsured.
During the COVID pandemic, which killed 1.1 million Americans, inadequate staffing and a lack of basic equipment like N-95 masks resulted in the collapse of infection control and the death of 3,600 nurses and healthcare workers in the first wave.
In New York alone, 453 perished — the most of any state — according to a joint investigation by the Guardian Newspaper and Kaiser Health News.
When federal health regulators watered down safety protocols, NYSNA predicted the deadly consequences.
“The investigation exposed how the Labor Department, run by Donald Trump appointee Eugene Scalia in the early part of the pandemic, took a hands-off approach to workplace safety,” the Guardian reported. “It identified 4,100 safety complaints filed by healthcare workers. Most were about PPE shortages — yet even after some were investigated, workers continued to die.”
Since COVID, through legislation in Albany and subsequent contracts, NYSNA made strides in improving patient–nurse ratios, mirroring a California policy in place since 2004.
“What’s at stake now is management is going back to 1998 — they want to take away our retiree healthcare, they want nurses to float to other units, they want to be able to cancel shifts,” NYSNA President Nancy Hagans, RN, told WBAI News.
On the Friday edition of What's Going On, host Julianna Forlano dug deeper into the staffing issue with Dr. Dania Muñoz, Adult Gerontology Acute Care Nurse Practitioner at Mount Sinai Hospital NEURO ICU.
RED CUP REBELLION
In her first segment, Forlano played sound from the opening rally of the Starbucks Workers United unfair labor practice strike in Brooklyn, replicated nationwide.
AFT President Randi Weingarten was on hand, as were several other local and state electeds.
The union — representing 12,000 Starbucks workers in 40 cities — is asking consumers not to cross their picket line during the company’s Red Cup holiday kickoff.
Workers note that finalizing a fair contract would cost Starbucks less than one average day of sales — and far less than the $96 million CEO Brian Niccol collected in four months of 2024.
That’s the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap in the U.S.: 6,666× the average barista’s salary.
Shareholder groups, the NYC Comptroller, major investment funds, and European institutional investors all warn that Starbucks’ anti-union strategy is hurting the company.
It’s worth remembering that Starbucks itself was inspired by a trip to Italy.
Howard Schultz walked into a Milan espresso bar in the 1980s, observed baristas treated as skilled professionals, and brought the concept back to the U.S.
But here’s the irony:
The same regions of Italy that inspired Starbucks — Turin, Milan, Genoa — were the historic center of the labor movement, birthplace of strong unions, strikes, and worker power.
So today’s Red Cup Rebellion isn’t fringe — it’s closer to the original spirit of the Italian coffee culture Starbucks claims as its inspiration.
