Fifteen thousand nurses in New York City are on strike. They don’t hit because they don’t care. They are striking because they care deeply about continuing to work within a system that normalizes harm — to patients and health care workers alike.
They demand what should never be negotiable: Safe staffing ratios, humane working conditions, livable wages, and the ability to provide care without suffering physical and moral injury in the process..
This strike is not an isolated event. It is the clear rupture of a system that has exceeded its moral limits.
On Thursday morning, before work, I went to work in the laboratory early in the morning. The lab technician drawing my blood looked exhausted. She told me they were chronically understaffed – always short, always in a hurry, always expected to do more with less.
While she was working, I told her the truth. That I recently worked eight hours straight, in multiple shifts in a row, without lunch and barely any water — and ended up getting a urinary tract infection. I told her that after 31 years in health care, this was still business as usual.
She didn’t look surprised. She immediately nodded and said they were always short too.
Different roles. Same system.
I also told her that I work part-time—maximum less than 29 hours a week—with no health insurance coverage at all. This is no coincidence. It’s by design. Health care systems increasingly rely on part-time work to avoid providing benefits, even as they require the intensity, availability, and emotional endurance of full-time work.
The exploitation does not stop there.
Money is still automatically deducted from our paychecks for lunch breaks we never get. The legally required 15-minute rest breaks for every four hours worked routinely disappear amid staffing shortages and patient volume. On paper they seem compatible. In fact, it’s wage theft — normal, systemic, and rarely challenged because health care workers are conditioned to put patients first at any personal cost.
Legally, this is not a gray area. Labor laws require that workers be paid for all hours worked, and that legally mandated rest periods be provided or compensated for. Automatic deduction from pay for lunch breaks that never occur constitutes wage theft. When I brought this up with my supervisor, I was told that “everyone eats at their desk or when they can.” This is how illegality is normalized – not through written policies, but through workplace culture.
A culture is created in which workers are pressured to silently comply, absorb the loss, and keep the system running. The result is a transfer of unpaid labor from health care workers to corporate health care systems, justified by “how things are done,” and enforced through fear of retaliation, appointment cuts, or job loss.
This is opportunistic. It preys on healthcare workers.
In New York, nurses have unions and have the legal right to strike. This is important. Because in states like Delaware, where I currently work, nurses can’t strike — not because conditions are better, but because unions are weak or nonexistent. There is no collective bargaining power, no real influence, and often no safe way to express an opinion without risking retaliation.
The result is silence imposed by fragility.
Unions deserve to exist in every state. While people often focus on union wages, the truth is that protections are far more important than the pay scale. The right to safe employment, breaks, due process, health insurance, and to speak without retaliation—these are not luxuries.
In states like Delaware, where unions are weak or nonexistent, nurses with more than 31 years of experience barely earn a living wage that reflects their skill, responsibility, or institutional knowledge. It’s a slap in the face. Especially when hospital administrators – far from the trenches of humanity – receive enormous salaries while frontline workers absorb the physical and emotional damage.
Nurses are not attached to the health care system. They are her nervous system. They are the ones who detect danger early, convey important information, respond to crises, organize chaos, and keep the entire body together under stress.
Real practical reform must acknowledge this fact. Nurses need enforceable staffing ratios, guaranteed rest periods, paid sick time, access to health care, protection from retaliation, and the right to unionize and strike in every state.
Striking nurses in New York City are not disrupting health care. They reveal what is already broken.
A health care system that destroys a person’s nervous system cannot heal a person.
Villabona-Kontz, a registered nurse for more than 31 years, is writing a book about health care.