There's just something masochist about their profession.
It'd also be enlightening for people in this thread to have hospital executives explain how they have some of the highest patient numbers in history yet they're hemorrhaging so much money their physicians had to take pay cuts.
Nurses, due to their profession having relatively low barriers to entry yet requiring years of operational knowledge to truly be effective, need collective bargaining. Nurses do strike, and nurse strikes are actively occurring on the U.S. West Coast. However, the unions they represent are small and have little power overall. For a strike to be successful you need solidarity from a majority of workers in the area you want to impact. You also need buy-in from the hospital/region that union nurses will provide superior care to non-union nurses. Something that's hard to do when your average executive thinks that the most complicated thing a nurse does is sticking a patient.
It's not about the illegality, it's really just about people dying. Yes you can go on a strike but your patient that's in critical condition won't survive on principle. You could say "just don't care about the patient and strike anyway", but that's extremely hard to do.
Striking when it hurts some millionaire owner is one thing, you wouldn't feel bad about yourself. Striking when it hurts someone post-op who did nothing wrong aside from being sick isn't noble, you get to live with the fact that as an individual you could have saved them, yet you didn't because you wanted money.
Not a chance, not a speculation, but absolute awareness of the number of patients that will not receive care and likewise will die as a result.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame nurses for poor treatment when they have a multitude of terrible options to pursue in order to improve their working conditions.