Thousands of Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers launch strike

Tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California and Hawaii walked off the job early Monday in the latest work stoppage to roil the nation’s largest not-for-profit medical provider.

Up to 31,000 registered nurses, nurse anesthetists, pharmacists, midwives, physician assistants, rehab therapists, speech language pathologists, dietitians and other specialty healthcare professionals are involved in the open-ended strike.

The workers previously held a five-day walkout with marches and picket lines in rainy weather in October.

The union that represents the striking Kaiser workers, called United Nurses Assns. of California/Union of Health Care Professionals and known as UNAC/UHCP, said it called a new strike because contract talks had stalled.

The union, in an unfair labor practice charge filed with federal regulators, accused Kaiser of unlawfully undermining negotiations and attempting to intimidate workers by warning them about the consequences of striking and directing their peers to report union activity to management.

The union’s president, Charmaine Morales, said in an interview that Kaiser had unilaterally stopped the bargaining process in mid-December, halting talks both with a national coalition of labor groups representing workers at the healthcare system over wages and benefits, as well as with local chapters, which hash out scheduling and other contract terms specific to various regions and roles.

Although the company had recently resumed negotiations with workers in Northern California, and agreed to restarting talks with other union units in California, no dates have been set for bargaining, she said. “The delay is disappointing,” Morales said. “They need to return to the table, that’s the biggest thing. You can’t go anywhere [in contract talks] if you’re not at the table.”

Meanwhile, the Oakland-based healthcare system called the strike “unnecessary” and filed a lawsuit last week arguing the union was not acting in good faith. Specifically, Kaiser accused the union of attempting “to coerce concessions” by compiling and threatening to release a report describing alleged unethical and unsafe practices by the company.

The lawsuit, filed Jan. 21 in federal court in the Central District of California, essentially seeks to dismantle the streamlined process of bargaining compensation packages nationally with a coalition of labor groups representing Kaiser workers, in favor of negotiating individually with each local unit.

The coalition, called the Alliance of Health Care Unions, counts some 62,000 Kaiser workers across 23 local unions among its members. UNAC/UHCP, which represents workers in California and Hawaii, is the alliance’s largest unit.

Camille Applin-Jones, senior vice president at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, in a statement on Sunday said the company decided to cancel bargaining because “it has become clear that the national process is gridlocked” and said that moving unresolved issues to local bargaining tables would be “the most effective and timely path.”

“Employees deserve their raises, and patients deserve our full attention, not prolonged disputes,” Applin-Jones said.

Sandra Flores, chief of staff for the Alliance of Health Care Unions, said the lawsuit was “without merit,” arguing that the company was using the legal challenge to break down bargaining. Flores said the group of unions “remains committed to the process and to getting a good contract.”

UNAC/UHCP said it has been pushing for increased salaries and solutions to staffing shortages in contract negotiations that have continued for more than seven months, but said Kaiser has scrapped discussions seeking to address employee burnout and safety. The union’s collective bargaining agreements with Kaiser Permanente expired Sept. 30.

The union has requested raises of 25% over four years, arguing that the wage boosts are necessary to compensate for the far smaller increases workers received in their 2021 contract negotiations, when they received a 2% raise in the first year. Kaiser said it has proposed 21.5% wage increases, describing it as its “strongest national bargaining offer ever.”

Applin-Jones said the strike was “designed to disrupt the lives of our patients” and described union members as seeking untenable wage boosts in response to a “generous offer.”

Applin-Jones said Kaiser has contingency plans in place to fill in gaps in patient care during the strike. The company has, during past work stoppages, hired thousands of temporary nurses, clinicians and other staff to replace striking workers. All hospitals and “nearly all” medical offices will remain open, Applin-Jones said; some in-person appointments may be shifted to virtual sessions, and some elective surgeries and procedures may be rescheduled.

Early Monday morning, scores of green and navy blue signs bobbed rhythmically in the hands of picketing workers outside Kaiser‘s Los Angeles Medical Center as a hired DJ played music and passing vehicles honked their horns. The facility on Sunset Boulevard is among roughly 20 sites across the state where the union set up picket lines, with the vast majority in Southern California.

Nina Titus, 48, a registered nurse, had her two sons and husband in tow on the picket line. Titus sported a badge honoring the memory of Alex Pretti, the nurse shot by immigration enforcement agents during a protest in Minneapolis on Saturday. Tears welled up when she spoke of Pretti: “As nurses, we are trained to run toward emergency, not away. And our instinct is always to help and that was what he was doing until the end.”

Titus said that because of inflation, she and other nurses were experiencing a wage decrease while company executives collected multimillion-dollar incomes.

“If you go back five or six years to the pandemic, we were treated like heroes, and now we’re treated like zeroes,” she said.

Around 9:30 a.m., about a hundred workers began a slow march around the block. They chanted: “Kaiser, Kaiser, you can’t hide. We can see your greedy side,” and blew plastic horns and whistles.

Picketer Bianka Tulgar, 54, a pediatric physical therapist, said “staffing ratios are horrid,” with therapists like herself forced to rapidly intake new patients, prolonging wait times for return appointments. After a patient in her rehabilitation unit has their first appointment, they typically have to wait three to four weeks for their next one — with some having to wait up to three months, Tulgar said.

Tulgar said the healthcare system has even failed to provide for basic, inexpensive toys in the budget, which are tools she needs to work effectively with children.

“That’s a problem,” Tulgar said.

Dianne Lipp, 55, said it was “very disheartening” to think about the money Kaiser was spending on temporary workers, when it could spend those funds on its employees, whom she described as having flagging wages still playing “catch-up since COVID.”

Lipp, who has worked at Kaiser for two decades, said she is the sole full-time occupational therapist serving three different pediatric departments at the medical center on Sunset Boulevard, dealing with particularly severe and acute cases in intensive care units that are transferred in from other Kaiser medical centers across Southern California. She largely handles cases of “preemie” babies born before term, for which she must advise on specialized care to prevent muscle imbalances, decide whether they need a gastronomy tube inserted, and assess motor skills to start bottle- or nipple-feeding, among other issues.

Although another therapist contributes five hours a week and Kaiser maintains a contract therapist on call, Lipp said the majority of the load falls to her, since Kaiser did not replace two therapists who retired several years ago. She’s so busy, she said, that she’s “not comfortable taking breaks.”

Lipp said she cares deeply about her patients and is “hoping we can just negotiate” and “work together.”

But for now, “instead of being inside taking care of babies, I’m out here again,” Lipp said.