Unions had been locked in a contentious debate with the nonprofit private health-care giant over wages, outsourcing and staffing shortages for six months before the strike began. Kaiser officials maintain that health-care providers across the country have struggled to attract and retain workers in recent years — even as the pandemic emergency 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 Saturday. Kaiser also pledged that hospitals and emergency departments would remain open even as dozens of clinics and other pharmacies temporarily closed, Kaiser said.
Keven Dardon, a striking Kaiser employee who registers patients at Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas, Ore., said his department has been cut from roughly 60 to 40 full-time employees since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, even as “we get messages every quarter that patient volumes are going up.”
He said that with reduced staff, patients often have to wait up to 25 minutes to check into the hospital, giving them less time with their providers and sometimes forcing them to reschedule appointments.
“The big thing is we’re burnt out,” said Dardon, who makes about $32 an hour now, 14 years in. “People are doing double and triple the work. … And you look at jobs in fast food, and everything is $20 an hour and up. We clean blood and disinfect bodies.”
Passing drivers honked their car horns in support for about 75 Kaiser pharmacists and optometrists, some wearing lab coats and scrubs, as they marched back and forth in front of Springfield Medical Center in Springfield, Va., on Wednesday morning, chanting “Hey, Kaiser, you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side.” The group was among about 400 workers in Virginia and D.C. that planned to stop work for one day.
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’s 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.”
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, he said, echoing concerns from other participants in the labor action.
Kaiser Permanente serves about 12.7 million customers — including 835,000 Washington-area members — and operates 39 hospitals and 622 medical offices, according to its website.
The strike at Kaiser arrives during a year of heightened labor activity in the United States. More than 445,000 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.
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. In July, amid the threat of a massive work stoppage, 340,000 UPS workers won their strongest contract in decades, which secured 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, and last 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, an assistant 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 pandemic, which workers say worsened working conditions and exacerbated already dire staffing needs. The coalition of unions 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. The nonprofit ran a net loss of $4.5 billion in 2022 on $95.4 billion in operating revenue, marking a sharp turn from the previous year’s positive net income of $8.1 billion. The organization said it faced higher expenses because of inflation, higher care volumes from treatment that had previously been deferred, and a “highly competitive labor market.” About three-quarters of the company is represented by a union.
The strike is expected to further impinge on its finances. Fitch Ratings senior director Kevin Holloran said Wednesday that the strike “will very likely result in cancelled procedures, reduced volumes, and a brief but sharp decline on provider revenues this week.”
Paula Coleman, a clinical lab assistant who oversees blood and urine testing for Kaiser and is on strike in Englewood, Colo., said that since the start of covid, 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.
“I can’t pay everything I need to pay on what I’m making” while her husband is out of a job, Coleman said.
Kaiser told Colorado patients in a Wednesday morning notice that it might see higher call volumes because of the strike, possibly resulting in longer wait times. It listed more than 20 of its labs, imaging centers and pharmacies that will close during the strike, mostly in the Denver and Boulder areas. The company also said it will bring in “licensed and qualified contract staff” in some cases to augment the workforce.
Some Kaiser customers facing disruptions vowed not to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking workers.
Roxanne Hawn, 55, a writer who lives near Golden, Colo., said she pushed back her husband’s appointment by months because of the strike. It had been scheduled for Wednesday morning at a Kaiser facility an hour from their home, and she said she didn’t want to go through the trouble if there’s any chance it would be canceled.
Hawn said she has been impressed by the level of coordinated care Kaiser provided to her sister, a two-time cancer survivor. But she said she comes from a union family and can’t bring herself to cross any picket line, even as a patient seeking care.
“We’re lucky in that our appointments are not dire … if it were [chemotherapy,] I might have different feelings,” Hawn said.
Others have had no problem keeping their appointments. Carissa McQueen, 38, is a script supervisor in the film and television industry in Los Angeles who sees a Kaiser mental health professional to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD.
McQueen said Kaiser called asking to delay her Thursday appointment, but she responded that she legally has to come into the clinic to receive her medication. Kaiser put her on hold for 10 minutes before allowing her to keep the appointment, McQueen said.
Her care has been top-notch, she said, but providers have told her they’re overworked to an unsustainable degree.
“I’ve been very, very happy with my care overall, but it still often feels like the priority is some kind of external financial motivation rather than the overall health and well-being of my community,” McQueen said.
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 coalition of unions said starting pay varies by position and region, but many Kaiser employees earn less than $20 an hour.
Niesha Etkins, 32, and her wife, Oluwatosin Etkins, 30, pharmacists at Capitol Hill and Northwest D.C. Kaiser locations, brought their 2-year-old daughter, Raya, to the picket line in Virginia dressed in a tiny white lab coat.
Oluwatosin, who is four months pregnant, said staff shortages mean more stress and taking on longer hours, sometimes working alone, while patients wait longer and have their calls go unanswered.
“It impacts employee health, physical, mental, but then it also impacts patient care,” she said. “You can’t give the best care to members when you yourself are struggling just to hold on.”
Amy Nakamura contributed to this report.