Kaiser mental health workers on strike in Southern California

SAN DIEGO (CN) — Unionized mental health care workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities in Southern California took to the picket lines for a third day Wednesday, vowing to strike until their demands for better pay and benefits and more staffing to ease workloads are met.

“It’s a factory. One patient after the other. It’s unethical,” said Grace Caluya, a licensed clinical social worker, outside of Kaiser Permanente’s San Diego Medical Center on Wednesday morning, surrounded by dozens of fellow National Union of Healthcare Workers in red shirts marching back and forth in front of the facility with signs that read “patients over profits” and “Kaiser, not very mindful. Not very demure.”

Kaiser’s mental health care workers like Caluya say they are not given the time they need to treat their patients properly, especially when it comes to responding to calls and emails and coordinating with social services for their patients. Therapists in 40-hour a week salaried positions usually see around 35 patients a week with no breaks, said Aimee Severe, a licensed marriage and family therapist and union steward.

That 40-hour work week can easily be extended when therapists have to fill out complicated and time-consuming paperwork for their patients to get the help they need, she added.

That not only overworks therapists and other workers, leading people to leave the job because of burnout, Caluya said, but it leaves patients, some of whom are dealing with severe trauma or distress, feeling like they’re not being cared for. That’s an especially severe problem if patients are in need of immediate care, and they can’t get an appointment with a therapist because there aren’t enough mental health workers on staff, she added.

That, plus, a lack of raises and pensions for employees hired after 2014 led the union of therapists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatric workers, counselors, palliative care and other mental health workers to strike at Kaiser facilities in Southern California from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, to San Diego.

“It’s too much,” Caluya said.

Workers want their new contracts with Kaiser to include seven hours per week to deal with the bureaucratic work needed to care for their patients, like developing treatment plans and coordinating with social services. They’re also asking for the reinstatement of pensions and a 28% pay increase over three years to make up for a number of years when they didn’t get cost of living adjustments, to match their pay with other health care workers in similar positions and attract and retain workers.

The union on Monday noted the successful 10-week strike of NUHW workers in Northern California in 2022 on similar grievances as a lodestar for the current strike in Southern California.

“However, Kaiser management has refused to extend those gains to Southern California, creating in essence a two-tiered mental health system where patients in Northern California have better access to care and mental health professionals have more time to meet the needs of their patients,”, Matthew Artz, a spokesperson for the union, said.

Only one therapist is available for 3,000 members in Southern California, whereas in Northern California, one therapist is available for 2,000 members, Artz said. And Caluya said a quarter of new therapists leave within a year because of burnout.

For patients who have established relationships with those therapists, that’s especially painful, she added.

Both Caluya and Severe both said their patients understand why they were going on strike, even if it means not seeing them until a contract is signed. Their patients, Caluya and Severe said, are supportive of the strike.

They understand “it’s not us, it’s the system,” Caluya said.

Severe said she’s even seen patients come to join the union’s picket line, which thinned a little bit compared to Monday since some members were in Glendale taking part in negotiations with the company.

NUHW members chose to “walk away from their patients at various Kaiser Permanente facilities in Southern California to take part in an open-ended strike called by union leaders,” Kaiser spokesperson Terry Kanakri said in an email.

“NUHW is putting pickets before patients. Instead, NUHW should engage sincerely at the table to reach an agreement that is good for our therapists and our patients. It’s irresponsible that NUHW is exploiting this post-Covid environment — when mental health care in the United States is in crisis — to ask behavioral health care professionals to go on strike and stop providing needed mental health care,” Kanakri added.

Mental health workers are paid well and the company’s proposed contract would increase wages by more than 18% over four years, Kanakri noted.