More than 75,000 employees in six states and Washington, D.C., of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare provider, on Wednesday began a three-day work stoppage.
Kaiser Permanente Antelope Valley’s LEED Gold Certified Medical Office Building in Lancaster, California. (Ted Eytan, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
In the largest-ever U.S. healthcare worker strike, more than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente employees in six states and Washington, D.C., began a three-day work stoppage Wednesday to protest what they say are unfair working conditions and unsafe staffing levels at hundreds of hospitals and clinics across the country.
The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions — which represents 85,000 KP workers in eight unions — began its national bargaining process in April in anticipation of worker contracts expiring at the end of September.
Union members are seeking across-the-board raises of between 5.75 percent and 6.5 percent; KP is offering 3 percent. Additionally, workers want protections against subcontracting and outsourcing, better performance-sharing bonuses, an improved retiree medical plan, and unionization rights for employees of nonunion entities acquired by the KP.
In a 2022 survey of 33,000 KP employees, two-thirds of respondents said they’ve seen patient care delayed or denied due to short staffing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Donate to CN’s Fall Fund Drive
“Kaiser executives are refusing to listen to us and are bargaining in bad faith over the solutions we need to end the Kaiser short-staffing crisis,” said Jessica Cruz, a licensed vocational nurse at Kaiser Los Angeles Medical Center. “I see my patients’ frustrations when I have to rush them and hurry on to my next patient.”
“That’s not the care I want to give,” Cruz added. “We’re burning ourselves out trying to do the jobs of two or three people, and our patients suffer when they can’t get the care they need due to Kaiser’s short-staffing.”
Healthcare workers at @kpthrive and medical facilities across California are speaking out against the dangers of short staffing and the effects on patients and caregivers. #united4all pic.twitter.com/eYcchWDGCM
— SEIU-UHW #United4All (@seiu_uhw) April 13, 2023
Based in Oakland, California, KP — which operates 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices staffed by over 300,000 workers and serving nearly 13 million patients — is the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare provider.
According to a statement from the coalition:
“Kaiser has reported $3 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. Despite being a nonprofit organization — which means it pays no income taxes on its earnings and extremely limited property taxes — Kaiser has reported more than $24 billion in profit over the last five years. Kaiser’s CEO was compensated more than $16 million in 2021, and 49 executives at Kaiser are compensated more than $1 million annually. Kaiser Permanente has investments of $113 billion in the U.S. and abroad, including in fossil fuels, casinos, for-profit prisons, alcohol companies, military weapons, and more.”
Workers in California, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., are participating in the strike.
KP Communications Manager Hilary Costa told Healthcare Dive Monday that “the best place to reach an agreement is at the bargaining table. We will ask our employees to reject any call to walk away from their jobs.”
However, 30-year KP employee Maria Jostes told the outlet that while “there used to be this real collaborative problem-solving approach,” over the past five or six years there’s been “a culture shift from folks at the very top.”
TheKaiser strike comes amid a surge in U.S. labor organizing and action, including the expanding United Auto Workers strike and the Hollywood writers’ strike, which ended last week with union members now voting on a tentative three-year contract.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Donate to CN’s
Fall Fund Drive
We need a different sort of organization to manage healthcare.
We’re not going to get real and effective health care for everyone, nor for most of us most of the time, at least not in the US. There no longer exists an electoral system adequate to force conformity to the population’s interests or desires. Strikes from medical personnel can be useful, but these are apt to repair the circumstance of medical professionals first, and that of patients only secondarily–naturally enough.
Organizations could be nonprofit NGO or more heavily dependent on county and local administration, separate from the Federal government, which more and more exclusively limits itself to blowing things up and breaking things.
A cooperative entity of this sort has some obstacles. It needs a good few people together, equipment, fairly deep pockets, and all that. But this is one of a handful of factors by which Americans are functionally enslaved and led around–think of all the things you or your relatives borrow money for: higher education, housing, healthcare, and transport for some.
Many years ago, I worked for an insurance company in Boston Harbor. I remember looking at a huge, fat, A14 paper file–NASA had a computer in those days, and Berkeley and MIT. The company was trying to collect car and life insurance from a man who had died in an accident in the insured car. Why? Because he had not canceled his insurance after death, so the company argued that he owed them from the time of death through all the time that they had procrastinated about paying.
I’d rather buy cheese for rats.
For profit health management (I refuse to call it healthcare) has to go. Who can doubt it at this point except those stealing more and more of our health dollars to line their own pockets?