Biggest-Ever US Health Care Strike Begins as 75,000 Kaiser Permanente Workers Walk Out
© Flickr / Ted Eytan
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After weeks of slowly degrading contract negotiations, tens of thousands of workers at health care giant Kaiser Permanente went on strike on Wednesday, beginning the largest health care-related strike in US history.
Last month, as the deadline for contract negotiations loomed and progress on talks looked grim, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, representing about 85,000 of the health system’s employees, approved a three-day strike in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington state, and a one-day strike in Virginia and Washington, DC.
The strike represents about 35% of Kaiser’s workforce of 213,000 employees who aren’t physicians, but still marks the largest strike by health care workers in US history.
“They’re not listening to the frontline health care workers,” Mikki Fletchall, a licensed vocational nurse and Kaiser employee from California, told US media. “We’re striking because of our patients.”
IT'S HAPPENING: The Kaiser Permanente strike is ON, making today the biggest healthcare strike in American history.
— Dripped Out Trade Unionists (@UnionDrip) October 4, 2023
This is the scene as workers walk in Orange County, CA as workers walk off in Anaheim!@AboutKP: wake up. #United4All #SolidaritySeason #ISupportKaiserWorkers pic.twitter.com/FYyULPaFk5
Some of the worker categories on strike include: vocational nurses; techs from emergency rooms, radiology, ultrasound, respiratory therapy, surgery, and x-ray departments; certified nursing assistants; dietary services; behavioral health workers; and pharmacy technicians.
According to the union, Kaiser has presented unacceptable demands in the contract talks, including slashing bonuses for frontline health care workers while giving executives bonuses; failing to raise wages in line with rising inflation; offering such little pay for entry-level positions that they’re not competitive with service industry jobs; and have refused to address chronic understaffing issues.
The workers also accuse the company of leaning into subcontracting in order to circumvent unionized workers.
The company made it big off the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing its profits skyrocket, but the workers say they haven’t seen the benefits, and that it’s not just them who are suffering from the long waits and worn-out coworkers, but patients as well.
22 September 2023, 21:27 GMT
Michelle Gaskill-Hames, the president of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals of Southern California and Hawaii, told US media the company still has a better worker retention rate than its competitors, all of whom are also facing difficulties from the pandemic-related health care crisis.
“Our focus, for the dollars that we bring in, are to keep them invested in value-based care,” she said. “I think coming out of the pandemic, health care workers have been completely burned out. The trauma that was felt caring for so many COVID patients, and patients that died, was just difficult.”
Among all professions, frontline health care workers suffered the highest death rate during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), followed closely by food service workers. Both groups were dubbed “essential workers” during the social lockdowns that predated the advent of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and were exempted from the restrictions that kept millions at home in an effort to slow the spread of the virus.
The strike comes amid a year of energetic labor actions as tens of thousands of automobile workers and actors remain on strike. Recently, some 53,000 Nevada hospitality workers voted to authorize a strike.
US President Joe Biden, who has long cast himself as cut from the same cloth as blue-collar Americans, has called himself the “most pro-labor president” in US history. However, his record has wavered on the issue; while he joined United Auto Workers members on the picket line recently, last winter he approved legislative action to stop railway workers from striking for better safety conditions. Just weeks later, a massive derailment in Ohio caused an extensive chemical spill that victims have compared to the Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine in 1986.
