14,000 nurses at Mt. Sinai, NY Presbyterian, and Montefiore hospitals are striking for demands that we share as part of the wider working class. The hospitals are trying to claw back the nurses health benefits and pensions, having them pay for the healthcare they dedicate their working day to out of their pension fund. Already, Mt. Sinai and Presbyterian have canceled the health insurance of striking workers in an effort to beat the strike.

The nurses are also fighting against chronic understaffing, where instead of the mandated 4-1 patient-to-nurse ratio, nurses are often faced with conditions up to 12-to-1. To avoid having to pay penalties, the hospitals are trying to scrap this mandated ratio entirely! Instead of hiring more nurses to alleviate the burden on nurses and patients alike, the hospitals are using vast amounts of cash to hire "travel nurses" to run the hospital during the strike and beat down the striking workers. All this not mentioning the fact that nurses, like all workers, are seeing their wages eroded daily by inflation and skyrocketing rents.

The attack on nurses by their employers reflects a wider attack on workers by the capitalist class, driving down costs to protect their profit margins. Workers everywhere are facing work speed-ups, understaffing, declining benefits, rent increases, and declining real wages. The fight of the nurses is the same fight of striking baristas, hospitality workers, and millions of workers pushed to poverty for the sake of profit.

But unlike the bosses, who are united in driving down living conditions, the working class is expected to fight workplace by workplace, sector by sector. Without the working class as a whole taking on capital as a whole, our fight will always be at a stark disadvantage. The union structure prevents our struggle as a class, since it is based on sector-by-sector negotiations. Not only are nurses divided by their union affiliation, split up between NYSNA, 1199, NYPNU, and so on, but they are also split off from all other workers in healthcare and other sectors. Workers struggles aren't combined through the union, but divided to the detriment of the real power of the working class.

By contrast, workers can fight as a class if we take our struggle into our own hands. Working class self-organization, like strike committees, mass assemblies, and workers’ councils, has led to the generalization of the fight historically, leading to city-wide mass strikes. For now, this can start with something as simple as setting up a group chat with your coworkers. Nurses can discuss and co-ordinate the direction of the strike, while other workers can make the connection between the nurses fight and their own, and act accordingly.

Even with a victory for the nurses, winning better benefits and working conditions is only a defensive, temporary victory. The crisis of capital will push bosses even further into attacking the working class, pushing down its living conditions. This same crisis is also driving world imperialism towards war, leading to the slaughter of countless workers. The only solution is in the working class fighting politically, its target being capitalism and class society itself. This entails the need for a working class political party, putting forward a revolutionary perspective within the wider class struggle. Then, instead of having to fight for the right to a decent life, we will fight to overthrow those who will deny us one.