Kaiser Permanente has averted strikes in Southern California, Oregon and Hawaii after reaching a tentative four-year contract with 50,000 employees, but its Northern California operations will still face mass walkouts over stalled talks with 700 engineers.
The small band of structural and biomedical engineers have been picketing Kaiser hospitals in Sacramento and other areas of the north state since Sept. 18, saying the health care giant is offering wages so meager that they will be paid far less than their peers working for other large health care providers by the end of their three-year contract.
“We’ve been on strike for 57 days,” said Shane Mortensen, the chief negotiator for Stationary Engineers Local 39, “and we will continue to do so until we get a contract.”
The numbers of pickets on the engineers’ line will balloon to the thousands as members of several large and powerful unions join them at Kaiser Roseville Medical Center, its Sacramento Medical Center on Morse Avenue in Arden Arcade, its South Sacramento Medical Center on Bruceville Road and its other hospitals north of the capital.
In Southern California, however, leaders of Kaiser’s Alliance of Health Care Unions quickly sent out word to their members and co-workers that their strike had been called off.
“The Alliance of Health Care Unions fought to preserve a Kaiser Permanente where patients can count on excellent patient care and service,” said Hal Ruddick, executive director of the Alliance of Health Care Unions. This has guided our work for 24 years. “This agreement will mean patients will continue to receive the best care, and Alliance members will have the best jobs. This contract protects our patients, provides safe staffing, and guarantees fair wages and benefits for every alliance member.”
The alliance pact will cover roughly 50,000 Kaiser Permanente employees in 22 local unions, and it will strengthen the company’s partnership with labor, company leaders said in a statement issued Saturday. The agreement covers a lot of ground, strengthening protections for employees and patients, providing annual wage increases, maintaining benefits and continuing to offer career development.
“This landmark agreement positions Kaiser Permanente for a successful future focused on providing high-quality health care that is affordable and accessible for our more than 12 million members and the communities we serve,” said Christian Meisner, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Kaiser Permanente.
He added: “These were challenging negotiations, but this tentative agreement demonstrates the strength of our Labor Management Partnership and the unique success it can achieve when we work together.”
Alliance leaders had said a key sticking point in negotiations was a Kaiser proposal to institute a two-tier wage structure that would pay workers differently depending on when they were hired or where they worked. Labor expert Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University said many companies experimented with such pay structures in the 1980s and discovered they not only divide workers but also result in low morale, low productivity and high employee turnover.
Company leaders have not proposed a two-tier structure to its biomedical and structural engineers, Mortensen said. Rather, he said, they have proposed meager wage increases and have broken off talks with union representatives.
“Kaiser keeps releasing that they’re actively negotiating with Local 39,” he said. “We haven’t been to the bargaining table since Oct. 22, and Kaiser refuses to come back and negotiate, and that’s infuriating. We want to sit down and hammer out this agreement.”
The biomedical and structural engineers are the workers who operate and maintain Kaiser’s buildings and medical equipment, including electrical distribution, fire life safety systems, X-ray machines, intravenous pumps and MRI machinery.
Members of other unions periodically have joined Local 39 engineers on the line over the last two months, said Georgette Bradford, a member of the executive council for the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, but they have become increasingly disgusted that Kaiser will not restart negotiations and want to make the public aware of the engineer’s plight.
Next week, Sacramentans will witness the unions’ ire. On Thursday, roughly 40,000 members of three unions voted to walk out in sympathy with Local 39, giving up a day of pay to drive home their point. The group will include optometrists, clinical laboratory scientists, X-ray technicians, housekeepers and other front-line workers from the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 29, and the Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20.
Then on Friday, about 22,000 registered nurses in the California Nurses Association and nearly 2,000 mental health clinicians in the National Union of Healthcare Workers will join their striking coworkers.
“Every time we’ve gone on strike to demand better care for our patients, the engineers have joined us on the picket line,” said Willow Thorsen, a Kaiser social worker in Santa Rosa. “We’re striking now to stand up for our colleagues and our patients.”
While sympathy strikes of this magnitude commonly happen in other parts of the world, they are not a common phenomena in the United States, especially among health care workers whose loyalty to patients is difficult to overcome, said Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Cathie Anderson covers health care for The Bee. Growing up, her blue-collar parents paid out of pocket for care. She joined The Bee in 2002, with roles including business columnist and features editor. She previously worked at papers including the Dallas Morning News, Detroit News and Austin American-Statesman.
Kaiser Permanente averts strike, Northern CA protest still on