THOUSANDS of nurses in New York City have gone on strike after negotiations over the weekend fail to reach a breakthrough in disputes with three major hospital organisations over staffing, benefits and other issues.

“Nurses on strike! Fair contract now!” nurses shouted on a picket line outside NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s Upper Manhattan site on Monday.

Others picketed hospitals run by the Mount Sinai and Montefiore organisations, where a nursing strike in 2023 led to a deal to boost staffing and pay.

“And now, it’s how they’re treating us. They don’t want to give us a fair contract and they don’t want to give us safe staffing and now they’re trying to roll back on our benefits,” emergency department nurse Tristan Castillo said outside Mount Sinai West.

About 15,000 nurses are involved in the strike, according to their union, the New York State Nurses Association.

The strike involves private, non-profit hospitals, not those run by the New York authorities. But the union casts the dispute as a struggle by lifesaving essential workers against hospital executives who make millions of dollars a year.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited nurses on the NewYork-Presbyterian picket line on Monday.

He said: “These executives are not having difficulty making ends meet,” saying that nurses are seeking “dignity, respect and the fair pay and treatment that they deserve. They should settle for nothing less.”

The union accuses hospitals of imposing unmanageable workloads.

Nurses also want better security measures in the workplace, citing incidents such as an episode last week when a man with a sharp object barricaded himself in a Brooklyn hospital room and was then killed by police.

The union also wants limitations on hospitals’ use of artificial intelligence.

The managements claim to have improved staffing in recent years and have dismissed the union’s demands overall as “reckless,” including exorbitant rises.

The union didn’t immediately respond to a question about its salary proposal and current wage levels.