75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers just walked out.

On Wednesday, an estimated 75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers across five states and Washington DC walked out in the largest health care workers strike in US history. After several days of negotiations over fair labor practices and higher wages, company and union members failed to reach a compromise.

Both groups “are still at the bargaining table, having worked through the night in an effort to reach an agreement,” the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions said in a statement, noting there “has been a lot of progress.”

Last month, health care workers threatened to go on strike if Kaiser didn’t agree to increased pay and solutions to the ongoing staff shortage, among other demands, before the union contract’s expiration on Saturday. While the strike is set to last for three days, union members say that they’re prepared to extend it to November if necessary.

“This is a difficult decision, and we know it will require sacrifices of us all,” wrote the Coalition. “but Kaiser executives continue to bargain in bad faith over the solutions we urgently need to the Kaiser short staffing crisis and the safety and well being of our patients and workers is on the line.”

As my colleague, Ruth Murai reported, the hospitals have a contingency plan in place to ensure continued operation.

  • SatanicNotMessianic
    5·
    9 months ago

    I was thinking the same, but that’s going to be ridiculously expensive. I can’t see how that would be a serious plan for an extended strike. I can’t imaging Kaiser could maintain that for very long in the face of a 6% raise ask.

    They have to have run the numbers, but if travel nurses are anywhere near where they were a year ago, they’re going to blow the budget on just that. It’s one thing to get a half dozen or dozen temp people in at 3x base pay, but you can’t do that with an entire staff, plus the fact that they won’t have the facility-specific knowledge to properly carry out their duties in the larger context of the particular hospital.

    I support the strike, but I’m just trying to imagine why Kaiser wouldn’t fold like umbrellas on this one because of the scale.

    • djquadratic@kbin.social
      3·
      9 months ago

      beats me. in the healthcare world kaiser is pretty polarizing. the effectiveness of having the entire healthcare system in one network has a lot of benefits (patient access, communication between physicians, billing) - but of course with that level of vertical power means that there’s ample room for greed to get in the way of prioritizing patient care and dignified treatment of their providers. So it’s possible they have a lot more money than we think, which means more time to try to demoralize the strikers.

      It could be an emotional/ego factor as well… execs who feel too proud to fold.

      what are your thoughts?

      • SatanicNotMessianic
        2·
        9 months ago

        I really don’t know. I was surprised to read that statement from the Hollywood exec that said they were planning on starving out the writers, and thought that not only was he idiotically saying the quiet part out loud, but he was guaranteeing the strike would go on just because of the level odd moral offense.

        I think where we go wrong is when we expect businesses to act as rational actors as if philosophical capitalism described real phenomena. For all I know, there is no spreadsheet saying that they’ll be bleeding $500M per month so fallback to negotiates a settlement if the strike lasts for more than five weeks. But that’s what I’d expect and want to see. I mean, I side with the strike, but also don’t want to think there’s some Elon fanboy calling the shots for Kaiser.