The temperature outside Mount Sinai West medical center on 10th Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday morning was barely escaping the teens, but some of the more than 15,000 unionized nurses who have been on strike for more than a week were buzzing, jostling, and treating the picket line as if it were a way to generate some pure kinetic energy to get warmer. Singing, clapping, and chanting "one day longer, one day stronger," the nurses from three of New York City's major private hospital systems appeared undaunted by either the frigid weather or the lack of progress on negotiations with hospital management.
"We have not heard from management. I'm out here striking with my peers until then," Nicole Rodriguez, a nurse who works as part of a medical-surgical telemetry unit at Mount Sinai West, told Hell Gate from the picket line. "Whenever they're ready, I'll run right back to the table,” said Rodriguez, who is also on the bargaining committee for the union. “They last spoke to us on Friday, and all we did was sit there. I would have rather been on the picket line than just sitting there in a room doing nothing."