Nurses, medical technicians, and other support personnel at hundreds of Kaiser hospitals and clinics in California, Oregon, Washington state, Colorado, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, took to picket lines on Wednesday morning in the largest strike ever in the US healthcare sector.
Kaiser, has said its hospitals and emergency departments have remained open despite the walkout, staffed by doctors, managers, and “contingency workers.”
Still, the strike pushed Kaiser to the forefront of growing labour unrest in the healthcare industry – and across the US economy – driven by the erosion of workers’ earning power due to inflation and pandemic-related disruptions in the labour force.
A marathon, round-the-clock bargaining session in which acting US Labor secretary Julie Su travelled to California on the eve of the strike to serve as a mediator broke off on Wednesday without a settlement.
Kaiser, a leading non-profit hospital network and managed-care organisation, said then that progress had been made on some unspecified issues.
However, union officials countered that they were “awaiting a meaningful response” from company executives to all of their biggest priorities, including demands for higher pay and increased hiring to address “crisis”-level staffing shortages.
Both sides expressed a readiness to return to the bargaining table, but as of late Thursday there was no word that talks had resumed or that more negotiations had been scheduled.
“All of the biggest, thorniest issues are still out there,” Caroline Lucas, a spokesman for the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions said via telephone on Thursday afternoon. “We’re looking forward to counterproposals.”
In any case, Lucas said, the striking workers will all return to their jobs by 6am on Saturday, 72 hours after the strike began, because healthcare workers by law must give advance notice of 10 days of any intent to go on strike.
Kaiser kept silent on the status of its contract deliberations through the day on Thursday.
Its previous four-year labour contract expired on Sept 30, after nearly six months of labour negotiations.
Burnout and high turnover
The union coalition has accused the company of failing to address a prolonged staffing crunch at Kaiser facilities that has left employees feeling overworked and underpaid while compromising patient care.
The company has acknowledged staffing shortages plaguing the entire sector, a consequence of occupational “burnout” from the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to more than 5 million medical workers leaving their jobs.
Short staffing and high turnover were among the final stumbling blocks to be settled at the bargaining table, as were union demands for safeguarding employees from an “outsourcing” of their jobs to vendors and third-party contractors.
Union officials have said their demand for higher pay was another major point of contention, while the company had argued that it already led competitors in total compensation packages in every market where Kaiser operates.
Unions across the US have grown bolder in their demands in the past two years, pressing for higher wages and better benefits in a tighter post-pandemic labour market.
Government data shows 2023 is already the busiest year for strikes overall since 2019, and that could grow in the coming days if hospitality workers in Las Vegas elect to take action against casinos, and if auto workers escalate their strike against Detroit’s big three automakers.
The Kaiser strike has idled more than 75,000 employees, union officials said. The largest number of workers previously involved in a major work stoppage in the healthcare sector was 53,000 in 2018, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The coalition of eight unions representing medical professionals and support staff at Kaiser insisted the company commit to hiring at least 10,000 new workers, in addition to filling some 4,000 recent vacancies, Lucas said.
The impact of the walkout on patients was greatest in California, Colorado, Oregon, and part of southwestern Washington state. In Virginia and Washington DC, only optometrists and pharmacists were on strike. Facilities in Hawaii, Georgia, and most of Washington state were unaffected.
Kaiser serves some 13 million patients nationwide and employs 68,000 nurses and 213,000 technicians, clerical workers, and administrative staff, alongside its 24,000 doctors.
Nearly 309,700 workers have been involved in work stoppages through August this year, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.