About 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and other health care professionals plan to hold an open-ended strike starting Monday.
Their main grievances are chronic understaffing, increasing workloads and concerns that Kaiser's wage and contract proposals will not address cost-of-living pressures.
Workers on strike are primarily represented by the United Nurses Association of California/Union of Healthcare Professionals (UNAC/UHCP). Their strike will affect 20 hospitals and 200 clinics in California and Hawaii.
Kaiser said it plans to keep its facilities open but warned of possible disruptions, rescheduled appointments and possible pharmacy closures.
This week, the health system released a statement saying national labor negotiations were stalled despite significant progress and a “historic” wage proposal, and accusing unions of engaging in dishonest tactics and derailing the bargaining process.
Kaiser said moving outstanding issues to local negotiations is the most practical way to reach an agreement on pay and benefits.
The union views the strike as a patient safety and workforce retention crisis, not just a wage fight. They argue that low staffing levels and increasing administrative pressures have led to delays in care — forcing clinicians to cut services and, in some cases, leave the organization entirely.
One union member, Cameron Cook, a nurse anesthetist at Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City, Calif., said Kaiser was not negotiating in good faith and was trying to paint union workers as greedy while avoiding serious bargaining.
Clinicians, he said, are not looking for significant financial gains but are trying to preserve existing benefits and protections that Kaiser is currently trying to eliminate despite claims of significant wage increases.
“While Kaiser did push the idea that they would provide very generous wage increases, they obscured the fact that they were actually trying to cut a lot of our benefits, retirement and health care, as well as our ability to control our own schedules,” Cook declared.
He also pointed to the dispute as a patient care issue and highlighted how staff shortages led to delayed appointments, canceled surgeries and miscommunication.
As a provider and patient family member, he has witnessed these issues.
“I have a child who has a permanent disability, so we go to Kaiser often. I see what patients face in this regard, like delayed or canceled appointments and not being able to get an answer or talk to someone. She recently had a major surgery and we haven't been able to follow up with her for three months. We eventually had to stop trying because no one would get back to us,” Cook said.
Ultimately, he thinks employees still believe in Kaiser's mission, but worries the organization is shifting toward corporate priorities at the expense of patients and frontline workers.
He warned that if Kaiser continues on its current path, the gap between its stated values and the day-to-day reality of patients and clinicians will only grow wider.
“We do like Kaiser. We believe in Kaiser. I think Kaiser's model is admirable when it comes to health care in the United States – but we're starting to see corporate interests creep in and, frankly, they're losing their way. We want to see Kaiser invest in patient care and the providers who deliver that care,” Cook said.
This type of labor dispute is not new to Caesars. The group of 31,000 workers most recently went on strike for five days in October over concerns about staffing, wages and patient care.
Photo: PM Images, Getty Images
