Health care workers picket outside US hospitals in multiple states
>> Tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers took to picket lines in multiple states on Wednesday, launching a massive strike that the company warned could cause delays at its hospitals and clinics that serve nearly 13 million Americans.
The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, rep- resenting about 85,000 of the health system’s employees nationally, approved a strike for three days in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington, and for one day in Virginia and Washington, D.C. Some 75,000 people were expected to participate in the pickets.
“Kaiser has not been bargaining with us in good faith and so it’s pushing us to come out here and strike,” said Jacquelyn Duley, a radiologic technologist among the hundreds of picketers at Kaiser Permanente Orange County — Irvine Medical Center. “We want to be inside just taking care of our patients.”
Hospitals still open
The Oakland, California-based nonprofit company said its 39 hospitals, including emergency rooms, will remain open. Doctors are not participating, and Kaiser said it was bringing in thousands of temporary workers to fill the gaps. Still, appointments and non-urgent procedures could be pushed back.
Early Wednesday, workers at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center cheered as the strike deadline arrived. The strikers include licensed vocational nurses, home health aides and ultrasound sonographers, as well as technicians in the
radiology, X-ray, surgical, pharmacy and emergency departments.
Brittany Everidge, a ward clerk transcriber in the medical center’s maternal child health department, was among those on the picket line. She said that because of staffing shortages, pregnant people in active labor can be stuck waiting for hours to be checked in. Other times, too few transcribers can lead to delays in creating and updating charts for new babies.
Across Virginia and Washington, D.C., only 180 workers were eligible to strike, according to Local 2 Secretary-Treasurer Sarah Levesque. The picketers had to travel miles across the region to meet up, so rather than commuting long distances for three days, they instead chose to participate in a one-day strike and converged in Springfield, Va., on Wednesday.
Patients like Carlos Herrera, 65, walked by picketers in Los Angeles.
Herrera, who was there for a kidney test, said there were few people inside urgent care and his 10:40 a.m. appointment was on time. He said he supports the strikers because they need more people to combat staffing shortages to treat patients like him.
The strike comes in a year when there have been work stoppages within multiple industries, including, transportation, entertainment and hospitality.
At least 453,000 workers have participated in 312 strikes in the U.S. this year, according to Johnnie Kallas, a Ph.D. candidate and the project director of Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker. That figure includes Kaiser workers.
He said the strike will likely hurt Kaiser’s reputation and its narrative of patient care more than its bottom line.
“I do think there’s a deep connection between what health care workers had to go through on the front lines of a global pandemic,” he said, adding the feeling now is “they really deserve a lot more in terms of pay, staffing, workplace health and safety.”
The health care industry alone has been hit by several strikes this year as it confronts burnout from heavy workloads — problems that were exacerbated greatly by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unions representing Kaiser workers in August asked for a $25 hourly minimum wage, as well as increases of 7% each year in the first two years and 6.25% each year in the two years afterward.