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Unions have been locked in a contentious debate with the nonprofit private health-care giant over wages, outsourcing and staffing shortages for six months. Kaiser officials maintain that health-care providers across the country have struggled to attract and retain workers in recent years — even as the pandemic receded.
Citing “a lot of progress,” Kaiser said in a statement Wednesday that both parties continued to meet until late Tuesday to reach a solution after contracts for unionized workers expired Sept. 30. Kaiser also pledged that hospitals and emergency departments would remain open during the strike, as dozens of clinics and other pharmacies temporarily close.
In Virginia, about 75 Kaiser pharmacists and optometrists, some wearing lab coats and scrubs, marched back and forth in front of Springfield Medical Center on Wednesday morning, chanting: “Patients, not profits,” “Hey Kaiser, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, short-staffing has got to go.”
Passing drivers honked their car horns in support. David Hawa, 58, an ambulatory care pharmacist at the Springfield center for 28 years, said he reported to work every day during the pandemic when the area was a ghost town to fill prescriptions even as his co-workers got sick or left the profession.
“It just become impossible to keep up,” he said, of the constant flow of prescriptions flooding in electronically. “You have less people to do the daily work and less people to do patient interaction.”
“We cannot continue this way,” he continued. As he spoke, a co-worker whose contract has not yet expired passed by on her way in to work, saying, “Fight for me too!”
With inflation, Hawa has also seen co-workers commuting long distances after being priced out of the area. This has eroded the work-life balance that Kaiser has prided itself on providing workers — echoing concerns from other participants in the labor action, which is largely centered on the West Coast and the Northwest. The company estimated minimal impacts to its 835,000 D.C.-area members, with “a small number” of pharmacy and optometry departments in Virginia closing Wednesday.
The strike at Kaiser arrives during a year of heightened labor activity in the United States. More than 375,000 workers have walked off the job this year so far, making it one of the biggest years for strikes since 2000, according to Bloomberg Law’s database of work stoppages. In Hollywood, 160,000 actors have been on strike since July, demanding higher wages and guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, some 25,000 autoworkers are on strike for the first time against all Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
The autoworkers are asking for higher pay to keep up with inflation and the right to strike over plant closures. Powered by a tight labor market and the surging popularity of unions, recent strikes — and even strike threats — have led to big concessions from major U.S. employers at the bargaining table this year.
Last week, negotiators for the screenwriters’ guild reached a tentative agreement with Hollywood studios to end a nearly five-month strike. The union called the deal “exceptional” and said it included “meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership.” In July, under the threat of a massive work stoppage, 340,000 UPS workers won their strongest contract in decades, which included abolishing a lower paid tier of workers and securing 48 percent raises for part-time workers over five years.
Health-care workers have also levied their share of work stoppages this year. Spanning New York to Texas to California, these strikes have largely centered on frustrations that nurses and other health-care professionals are being asked to care for too many patients as staffing levels have dwindled. Raising wages amid high inflation has also been a top priority. In the health-care industry, where strikes can disrupt critical services, many work stoppages are not open-ended as is common in other sectors, lasting only a few days.
“The reason you are seeing so many strikes is you are seeing so many workers strike and win. The copycat effect is so strong precisely because strikes work,” said Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “Workers across the U.S. economy have been turning to strike action because they’ve been put into a squeeze by economic circumstance at the same time they have more wind in their sails to fight back.”
The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which represents 85,000 Kaiser health-care workers — including about 3,800 employees in the District, Maryland and Virginia — is negotiating the first contract since before the coronavirus pandemic, which workers say worsened working conditions and exacerbated already dire staffing needs. The union has argued that Kaiser needs to offer higher wages and make other investments in staffing to attract employees and reduce patient wait times.
Kaiser officials say their employees earn comparatively higher wages and benefits and received nearly $1 billion in special benefits during the pandemic.
Paula Coleman, a 10-year clinical lab assistant who oversees blood and urine testing for Kaiser in Englewood, Colo., and will strike this week, said she wants Kaiser to address low staffing levels in her lab that jeopardize patient care and safety. Coleman said she is often the only person working in her lab in the early mornings and worries she would not have backup if an emergency struck while she was drawing a patient’s blood.
“We feel the absence of our co-workers every day,” Coleman said. “This could be someone’s mother, sister, brother or daughter. This is about patient safety.”
Coleman says the strike is also about pay. Since the start of the pandemic, Coleman said she has seen many of her colleagues quit for less stressful and more lucrative jobs, while those who remain see their workloads increase as their wages lose purchasing power with the rising cost of living. Some of her colleagues have started working second jobs to make ends meet; others can only afford to live hours away near the Kansas border. With her husband out of work, Coleman, who makes around $28 an hour, is in the process of applying for a second job at Pizza Hut to keep her household afloat.
In negotiations, the coalition has requested a $25 an hour minimum wage across the health-care giant, as well as annual pay increases of 7 percent for the first two years of the contract and 6.25 percent for the latter two years.
In its latest offer, Kaiser has said it would raise minimum starting pay to between $21 and $23 an hour, with annual raises of between 3 and 4 percent.
The Kaiser strike will also involve a limited number of nurses. Justin Seronko, 35, an emergency room nurse at the Kaiser medical center in Moreno Valley, Calif., said he is going on strike to see dwindling staffing levels addressed at his hospital. Bottlenecks of patients form when the emergency room and other parts of the hospital are understaffed as they have been this year, he said, “throwing the hospital off balance” and delaying patient care.
“We’ve seen that Kaiser has made record money, but we haven’t seen that reflected in staffing,” Seronko said. “This is the first time I’ve seen multiple pages of open jobs that aren’t being filled. This isn’t about Kaiser being the devil. I’d like to see Kaiser move back to being beyond amazing. It used to be the promised land for nurses.”
Kaiser Permanente serves about 12.7 million customers and operates 39 hospitals and 622 medical offices, according to its website. Its customers in the District, Maryland and Virginia receive care at outpatient clinics that provide coordinated primary care, pharmacy, lab, imaging and other ancillary services.
The one-stop-shop care model is what attracted Amanda Curling, 42, an optometrist at Tysons Corner Medical Center, to Kaiser 15 years ago, but she said vacancies mean she waits longer to see patients, rarely takes a lunch break and routinely works late.
“It falls on the providers,” Curling said in a phone interview Monday night. “We want to provide the best quality and we do, but it falls on us to put in that extra time.”
Curling said she compartmentalized her fears to push through the stress of the pandemic, waiting on relief only to face a backlog of people who delayed care and now have urgent needs — with fewer technicians left to share the load.
Add to that emotional toll an economy that’s squeezing low-wage workers, and you have a perfect storm, said John August, program director of health-care labor relations at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a past previous executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
While recent high-profile labor wins might pressure Kaiser to capitulate, August said, the victory could have long-term consequences.
“It’s often the case when there’s a victory by one party in a very acrimonious situation,” he said, “there tends to be a pendulum that swings. ‘Well, you beat me this time. I’m not going to let that happen next time.’”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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