There is nowhere nurses would rather be than at the bedside of their patients. When 15,000 nurses with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) decided that they needed to be outside on the picket line, in record-setting cold, it is because something is deeply wrong inside their hospitals.

What began on January 12 as the largest strike of nursing staff in New York City history has ballooned into an extended war of attrition between workers and CEOs. The nurses’ demands have not changed: safer staffing levels, a modest pay increase, and stricter security measures to keep nurses safe at work.

The response from the bosses has been to spend $100 million on scab nurses, to fire workers who spoke out, and to slander the union. Our governor has also sided with the bosses, signing and then extending an executive order that allows hospitals to disregard training minimums and bring in hundreds of underqualified nurses.

This strike isn’t about money. It is about ensuring that the people who care for us are cared for.

When the people who take care of us do not feel safe in their workplaces, we all suffer. Current staffing levels endanger patients. Nurses are expected to care for double or triple, or even more, patients than the standards set in peer-reviewed nursing studies.  The quality of our health care should not be determined by the bottom lines of multimillion-dollar hospitals who can afford to pay CEOs tens of millions of dollars while denying patients the care they deserve. But this is the result of a health care system that prioritizes profits over care and community.

What nurses are demanding is not radical, and it is not selfish. They are simply asking for the security in their jobs to live lives of dignity and to not feel as if saving the life of a patient comes at the expense of their own.

This isn’t a new issue. When I worked as an ICU nurse, we were recommended to only have two patients at a time due to the intense care they needed to receive. We were routinely tasked with caring for two or three that many. I was overworked every day. Burned out from the physical and emotional stress of not being able to properly care for my patients on top of not being able to care for myself.

Short staffing and greedy hospitals turn a hard job into an impossible one. From a financial perspective, a higher caseload means higher profits. For a nurse on the floor, it is the difference between burnout and having a livelihood. I know that feeling well.

I remember when I first started working, I was told directly that if I got active in the union, NYSNA, I could kiss my job goodbye. But I didn’t listen, and I joined NYSNA. It was the union that fought for me in the workplace, and it was the union that gave me the stability to start a family.

Nurses today are facing violence. Nurses are facing underpayment, and nurses are facing the same system that puts their patients at risk. But they have a union. A union that is strong and will fight for them to the bitter end.

I have a message to the CEOs of NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and Montefiore hospitals: you are choosing greed and profit over safety for your staff and proper care for your patients. You are making a choice to spend $100 million to bus in scab nurses instead of supporting the people who run your hospitals.

It is not too late to choose to support the nurses who run your hospitals.

But the corporate hospitals have dug in for a long-haul fight. In order to win, the nurses need support from my colleagues in Albany, they need support from their brothers and sisters in the labor movement, and they need the support of everyday people to march with them on the picket line.

The nurses are shouting. Will New York listen?