NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York plans to cut its workforce by 2 percent, a spokesperson announced last week. Given that the hospital employs about 50,000 workers, this announcement means that about 1,000 workers will lose their jobs. The hospital has not said which types of workers would be affected or whether they would receive severance pay or other benefits. Nor has it provided a timeline for the cuts.
NewYork-Presbyterian is a nonprofit medical center with eight campuses in the greater New York area. It is the main teaching hospital for Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and for Weill Cornell Medicine. The hospital has more than 4,000 beds and receives more than 2 million visits each year, including more than 620,000 emergency department visits and about 22,000 infant deliveries.
The layoffs are a response to “current macroeconomic realities and anticipated challenges ahead,” the hospital spokesperson said. NewYork-Presbyterian reported $10.3 billion in revenue in its December 2023 filing with the Internal Revenue Service.
“The magnitude of what’s happening at the federal level plus the magnitude, quite frankly, of our loss of volumes across the board has mandated that we need to take this action,” CEO Steven J. Corwin said in a message to the hospital’s workers. Corwin received $14.6 million in compensation in 2023, according to the IRS filing. He is among the highest paid hospital CEOs in the United States.
NewYork-Presbyterian announced the coming layoffs only four days after it agreed, along with Columbia University, to pay $750 million to settle a sexual abuse case from 2023. In all, 576 patients reported having been sexually abused by former gynecologist Robert Hadden, MD, between 1987 and 2012. Hadden was arrested in September 2020, convicted in July 2023 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The two main unions present at NewYork-Presbyterian are the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and 1199SEIU. Neither has made any public statement opposing the announced layoffs.
NYSNA is not a defender of nurses’ jobs but a partner of management in preventing strikes and imposing concessions on its members. In 2022, about 17,000 nurses at 12 New York hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian, voted almost unanimously to strike if no agreement was reached by the time their contract expired on December 31. They demanded better pay, an end to overwork and better staffing. But instead of leading a powerful, united strike, NYSNA kept nurses divided and negotiated tentative agreements with the hospitals one by one. The agreement with NewYork-Presbyterian, which included a cut to real wages and did not meaningfully address nurses’ demands for better staffing, became the template for the other hospitals.
Health systems also find a willing collaborator in 1199SEIU. The union did not lead workers in a struggle against the closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York, which occurred in April. A transporter at that hospital told the World Socialist Web Site that union representatives were scarce during the period before the closure. Moreover, during the same period, the main Mount Sinai Hospital fired a succession of workers without the least opposition from 1199SEIU.
The announced layoffs at NewYork-Presbyterian are the latest in a wave of attacks on healthcare workers. In recent months, the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, Mass General Brigham in Boston, Jefferson Health in Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania have all cut workers or administrators. Many of them have cited financial challenges as the reason for the layoffs, even as their executives continue to receive millions of dollars in compensation.
These cuts are occurring in the context of a coordinated assault on health and science by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump plans to cut $40 billion from the HHS budget, or about one-third of its discretionary budget. The targets include the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (which will lose all its chronic disease programs), the Food and Drug Administration and rural health programs. Significant cuts and restrictions to Medicaid, which provides aid to poor patients, have been proposed as well.
This wrecking operation is the response of the American ruling class to its unprecedented economic crisis. The national debt is approximately $36.2 trillion, which is equivalent to, if not greater than, the annual gross domestic product. This untenable situation has raised doubt about the dollar’s continued role as the world’s reserve currency. This doubt is reflected in record high gold prices. The US ruling class seeks to extricate itself from this crisis through wars of plunder abroad and through the increased exploitation of the working class at home. The money cut from the HHS budget will be redirected toward military expenses and tax cuts for the corporate and financial elite. These cuts will affect public health not only in the US, but also throughout the world.
The fight to defend healthcare workers’ jobs at NewYork-Presbyterian, and at hospitals nationwide, is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, which subordinates all other considerations to profit. The record of NYSNA and 1199SEIU shows that the unions will not lead such a fight. In fact, they are actively working to block it. As they collaborate with management, they also seek to bind workers to the Democratic Party, which is no less a party of Wall Street and war than the Republican Party is.
Healthcare workers will not be able to make gains unless they establish their organizational independence from the trade unions and their political independence from the capitalist parties. The first step in this direction is the formation of rank-and-file committees of healthcare workers. Democratically controlled by the workers, these committees will be the forum in which workers can identify their demands and develop a fighting strategy for winning them. These committees also can reach out to each other and to other sections of the working class, thus breaking the isolation that the healthcare unions impose on them. Through this strategy, healthcare workers can wage a powerful and united struggle to defend jobs and public health.