Federation of Nurses/UFT members at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn on Feb. 26 overwhelmingly ratified a contract that provides a 15.8% raise compounded over two years and includes new commitments from the hospital to address the chronic shortage of nurses.
The agreement followed weeks of contentious negotiations that brought them to the brink of a strike. The union had filed a strike notice on Feb. 18, 10 days before the contract was due to expire.
“This 11th-hour agreement finally gives our nurses the compensation and recognition they’ve earned by raising salaries to be competitive with the marketplace and ensuring that staffing is sufficient for patient safety and working conditions,” said UFT Vice President Anne Goldman, the head of the Federation of Nurses/UFT.
The new contract, which includes no givebacks, provided an immediate raise of 9.25% on March 1 and another 6% raise on March 1, 2026.
NYU Langone agreed to hire 100 new nurses. With those new hires, the emergency department should now have enough nurses to care for patients who are ready to be admitted but remain in the emergency room until a bed is ready. Under the agreement, Augustana, another section of the hospital, will now be staffed with regularly assigned nurses.
“The nurses forced management to drop the excuses and acknowledge that it is their responsibility to correctly staff the hospital,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.
The Federation of Nurses/UFT has been fighting for years to enforce safe staffing ratios at the hospital in Sunset Park. Nurses have filed thousands of short-staffing incident reports in the past three years. In a groundbreaking arbitration ruling in late 2023, NYU Langone was required to pay nurses for working on shifts without sufficient staff. But the hospital lagged on the payments, and short-staffing remained an issue.
Michael Teahan, a nurse and a member of the union negotiating committee, said that on short-staffed shifts, the patient-nurse ratio grows wider, with significant implications for patient care. “It’s a massive safety risk,” he said.
The new contract sets the rate at which the NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn nurses should be paid for short-staffed shifts and empowers supervisors to resolve the grievance at the first step. It also establishes a strict timeline for payments, so nurses will be compensated for sustained short-staffed grievances within two pay periods.
Nurses retained their premium-free health care and employer-provided pensions. They also made gains in professional support: NYU Langone must hire two nurse instructors to ensure that staff nurses are properly trained in their assigned clinical divisions.
To help foster stability in department staffing, the contract also includes one-time bonuses ranging from $3,750 to $5,250 for nurses who remain in the same unit and shift for at least 18 months.
Chapter Leader Moncef Righi says that these bonuses, along with the contractual raises and new experience differentials, make him optimistic that NYU–Langone will be able to retain nurses now that its pay scale is comparable to surrounding hospitals. “A lot of people would come to our hospital, work for one year to get the experience and then go to other hospitals that were paying more,” he said.
Goldman stressed that the union’s fight for fair working conditions and patient safety will continue.
“Health care corporations care about one thing — the brand,” she said. “We care about one thing — patients.”