OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) — Kaiser Permanente workers hit picket lines again at hospitals in the West, nearly one year after a two-month strike that demanded the health giant overhaul its struggling mental health provider system.
Health care workers began picketing Tuesday at hospitals across the San Francisco Bay Area. The workers are part of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, representing more than 85,000 health care workers in seven states and the District of Columbia. Their contracts will expire Sept. 30, and are protesting an ongoing crisis of short staffing that they say affects patients and caregivers.
In front of the Kaiser hospital in the Oakland suburb of San Leandro, workers marched with signs saying that the company’s management has refused to improve chronic understaffing since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lenetra Stevenson, who works at the hospital as a patient care technician, said she is frustrated that executives took bonuses while denying them to lower staffers.
“Our last bargaining session didn’t go well,” she said. “The cost of living wages has gone up for everyone, but they don’t want to pay us what we’re worth.”
Stevenson said she and other workers are prepared to go on strike by Oct. 1 if Kaiser does not strike a deal with the union.
“We get overworked, we get tired and sick,” she said. “We can’t meet basic needs for our patients. They (Kaiser managers) have been told that through the whole pandemic.”
Other workers said understaffed clinics cause long wait times and mistaken diagnoses, neglecting patients seeking care.
In April, the coalition began its national bargaining process in the third-largest set of union negotiations in the United States. The coalition says that despite being a nonprofit organization, paying no income taxes on its earnings and very little in property taxes, Kaiser Permanente reported more than $21 billion in profit over the last five years. The company’s net worth doubled between 2018 and 2022 to $58.9 billion. And 49 of its executives earn more than $1 million annually.
“While workers have been struggling to do the work of two or more people while surviving a worldwide pandemic, Kaiser made billions in profits over the last few years, yet staffing has been so critically low that many workers have gotten fed up and left,” Roy Ongpin, an emergency technician at Kaiser South San Francisco, said. “Kaiser needs to invest in its workforce and do what it takes to attract and retain healthcare workers who provide quality patient care.”
“We are understaffed, overworked, and stretched so thin during our shifts,” Lori Pimentel, a scheduling worker at Kaiser Vacaville, said. “Kaiser has made billions in profits over the last five years, yet they’re not investing enough to keep caregivers at our facility.”
Kaiser has 4.6 million enrollees in Northern California alone, and the company has long faced scrutiny for how it manages mental health treatment.
State regulators fined by the hospital giant for denying members timely access to care, and the Department of Managed Health Care said in 2022 it would conduct a non-routine audit of Kaiser’s mental health services after fining Kaiser $4 million for failure to provide adequate mental health treatment in 2013.
Kaiser has said that a shortage of clinicians is a major challenge, and ended the 2022 National Union of Healthcare Workers strike with a four-year deal promising to fix problems in the system that leave patients waiting months for care.
Pickets are planned at multiple facilities across California, Washington state, Oregon and Colorado. Kaiser said in a statement Tuesday that all facilities remain open.
“Given where we are in the bargaining process, it’s clear the picketing by the coalition isn’t about drawing attention to new issues, but rather an attempt to create bargaining leverage,” the company said.
“We have discussed with the coalition that in some regions Kaiser Permanente is paying coalition-represented employees up to 28% above the market average wage rates — impacting our overall costs and ability to attract new members. In other regions, we are paying at or slightly above the market average, which hurts our ability to attract new employees and retain the excellent employees we already have.”
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