Talks held as pharmacists prepare strike
A deal between Kaiser Permanente and thousands of its pharmacists remained elusive Sunday afternoon ahead of a planned weeklong strike that is expected to temporarily close outpatient pharmacies across Northern California.
Patients in the Bay Area rushed to refill their prescriptions ahead of the planned strike, which is expected to begin Monday and last up to seven days if no agreement is reached. A weekend of last-minute negotiations and deal-making saw Kaiser reach tentative agreements with several other unions covering about 50,000 employees in Southern California, while failing to announce deals with two key unions in the Bay Area and Northern California.
Representatives for the health care provider and the Guild of Professional Pharmacists met in person Sunday seeking a last-minute deal, said John Lee, the guild’s president. The guild represents 2,100 pharmacists across Northern California. The guild gave no indication it will back off its Monday plans.
Kaiser said its mail-delivery pharmacy will remain open during the planned strike, and it suggested that
patients who do not need prescription refills right away should wait until the morning of Nov. 22.
Patients who need urgent prescriptions over the next week can receive directions from Kaiser staff on how to fill prescriptions at retail pharmacies, the health provider said. Hospital pharmacies also will remain open for inpatient care.
The pending strike prompted many patients to rush to pharmacies across the Bay Area this weekend to refill their prescriptions. Among them was Eva Chrysanthe, 53, who said she was among 30 to 40 people in line at a Kaiser pharmacy on Saturday evening — far more than she’d ever seen at the pharmacy.
“It was pretty crowded,”
Chrysanthe said. “A lot of people in line. And a lot of people sitting, from the window to the entrance.”
Herself a former medical technician at UCSF, she voiced support for the pharmacists and lauded their “incredibly demanding work.”
“I think everyone knows that those front-line workers have borne the brunt of a lot of the pandemic,” Chrysanthe said.
Kaiser leaders have claimed their pharmacists are “among the highest paid in the profession,” and said that their proposals have included wage increases and no changes to the pharmacists’ medical benefits.
“Given Kaiser Permanente’s respectful and generous proposal we are disappointed that the Guild would ask its members to walk away from the patients that depend upon them every day and deliberately disrupt their care,” the heath care provider said in a statement Sunday. “We are continuing to bargain in good faith with the Guild for Professional Pharmacists and hope to reach agreement very soon.”
Multiple messages from this organization seeking further comment from pharmacy guild leaders were not returned Sunday.
If pharmacists follow through on their plans not to show up to work on Monday, their strike would mark the second active work stoppage at Kaiser facilities in Northern California.
Local 39 Operating Engineers has been on strike for about two months in search of a more robust agreement with the health care provider. The union includes about 700 workers who maintain and repair Kaiser’s hospital buildings, as well as the equipment inside them.
A third strike may also be held on Friday that could disrupt operations for the day at clinics across the region. The California Nurses Association said that its 20,000 members plan to go on a 24hour strike starting at 7 a.m. Friday, Nov. 19, in solidarity with the engineers union. They will be joined by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents 4,000 mental health professionals in California and Hawaii.
The engineers’ ongoing strike has left some hospitals in disrepair, said Diane McClure, a registered nurse at a Kaiser hospital in Sacramento. She specifically noticed an elevator that has been broken for more than a month at the facility where she works, and other equipment that has been tagged for repair and shelved.
“They’re our co-workers — they make a huge difference in what we do as nurses,” McClure said. “These are workers that need to get back to work. There’s just no reason for Kaiser not to settle their contract.”
The looming pharmacists’ strike comes as several work stoppages involving other Kaiser employees elsewhere in the state were narrowly avoided this weekend.
On Saturday, 22 unions comprising the Alliance of Health Care Unions struck a deal with Kaiser that avoided an indefinite slowdown at more than 300 Kaiser offices in California.
Until then, Kaiser officials had been girding for some 35,000 Kaiser workers to walk off the job next week, including nurses, midwives, physical therapists and others.