https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1qjv735/zohran_mamdani_intervenes_in_effort_to_shut_down/

Eleven days into the strike by 15,000 nurses in New York City, talks are set to resume Thursday between the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and the hospital systems of Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.

In a statement on its website, NYSNA attributed the resumption of talks to the hospitals “being urged back to the negotiating table by Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani.” It is clear that NYSNA is working closely with Democratic Party officials, principally Zohran Mamdani, who appeared on the picket line this week for the second time in an effort to bring the strike to a close as quickly as possible.

The NYSNA statement even suggested that the union is prepared to send workers back to the job before they have a chance to vote on any potential deal, stating that the strike will continue only until “tentative agreements are reached with the hospitals.”

At a rally outside Mount Sinai on Tuesday, Mamdani reiterated his role in pushing for a deal to end the strike, stating, “We are encouraging everyone to return to that bargaining table.” He added that a strike is “not where workers want to be” and called for a “swift and urgent resolution,” making clear his priority was to bring the nurses back to work as quickly as possible.

…

The success of the nurses’ strike depends on a clear assessment of the forces involved. It’s not a question of Mamdani or any other politician showing up on the picket line, with their honeyed words. The two big-business political parties are well schooled in speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Ultimately it’s a question of whose class interests they serve.

While the NYNSA works with Mamdani to try to shut down the strike, the rest of the trade union apparatus is doing nothing to mobilize broader support.

To take forward the struggle, the WSWS urges nurses to build rank-and-file strike committees—democratically elected and led by nurses themselves—to establish democratic control over the strike. Nurses should formulate their non-negotiable demands as the precondition for accepting any contract or ending the strike.

The real allies of striking nurses are the fellow hospital workers who are being forced by their union to cross picket lines, the nurses at other public and non-profit hospitals that face the exact same conditions, the transit workers who are launching a contract struggle of their own presently, and the logistics workers struggling against dangerous working conditions.

The nurses’ strike coincides with a broader intensification of the class struggle. Trump is accelerating this process, most recently by deploying thousands of ICE agents and other federal forces to occupy Minneapolis, part of a broader attempt to impose dictatorial control and suppress any and all opposition.

The response by the working class is not acquiescence, but the initiation of a struggle against it, including calls for a general strike in Minneapolis on Friday. Beyond Minneapolis, workers are being drawn into struggle, including nurses in California who are preparing a strike of their own against Kaiser Permanente, raising the possibility of coordinated action among healthcare workers around the country.

To win the strike, nurses must connect with and develop the initiative of the workers, building rank-and-file committees to transform the strike into a wider offensive.