LOS ANGELES Approximately 75,000 Kaiser Permanente employees left their jobs in multiple states on Wednesday, launching a significant healthcare strike amid an extraordinary year for labor organizing and work stoppages in the United States.
With 39 hospitals nationwide, Kaiser Permanente is one of the country’s largest insurers and health care system administrators. Nearly 13 million people are covered by the Oakland, California-based nonprofit, which sends them to clinics and hospitals it operates or contracts with to provide care.
The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which represents approximately 85,000 health system employees nationwide, asserts that understaffing is detrimental to patient care. Members approved a three-day strike in California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington and a one-day strike in Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Workers applauded as the strike deadline approached in the predawn hours outside the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Centre. Licensed vocational nurses, home health assistants, ultrasound sonographers, and radiology, X-ray, surgical, pharmacy, and emergency department technicians are among the striking workers.
Thousands Of US Health Care Workers Go On Strike In Multiple States Over Wages And Staff Shortages
Culinary Union members, including Veronica Flores Serrano, who works at The Linq, vote in a strike vote on the UNLV campus Thomas & Mack Centre on Tuesday, September 26, 2023. Tens of thousands of hospitality employees who maintain Las Vegas’s iconic casinos and hotels were scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether or not to authorize a strike amid ongoing contract negotiations.
The strike of autoworkers expanded to 38 locations in 20 states. Biden planned a visit to demonstrate support.
Brittany Everidge, a ward clerk transcriber in the medical center’s maternal child health department, said short-staffing in her position means pregnant people in active labor may be trapped in a waiting room for hours before they can get checked in. Occasionally, more transcribers can be needed to create and update records for newborns.
During a phone interview from the picket line, she stated, “We never want to be in a position where the nurses must perform our duties.”
Kaiser says its hospitals, including emergency rooms, will remain open during the picketing, which does not involve doctors. The company announced it would hire thousands of temporary workers to cover vacancies caused by the strike. However, the strike may cause delays in scheduling appointments and rescheduling non-urgent procedures.
It occurs in a year when multiple industries, including transportation, entertainment, and hospitality, have experienced work stoppages.
Thousands Of US Health Care Workers Go On Strike In Multiple States Over Wages And Staff Shortages
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated the problems caused by burnout and excessive workloads in the healthcare industry, which have been the source of multiple strikes this year.
In August, unions representing Kaiser employees requested an hourly minimum wage of $25 and annual increases of 7% for the first two years and 6.25% for the following two years.
They claim that understaffing boosts the hospital system’s profits but harms patients and that executives have negotiated poorly.
Mikki Fletchall, a licensed vocational nurse at a Kaiser medical office in Camarillo, California, stated, “They’re not listening to the frontline healthcare workers.” “We are on strike due to our patients. We wish we didn’t have to do it, but we will.”
Next year, Kaiser has proposed hourly minimum compensation between $21 and $23, depending on location.
The hospital system has hired 51,000 employees since 2022 and plans to add 10,000 more by the end of the month.
Kaiser Permanente reported a second-quarter net income of $2.1 billion on more than $25 billion in operating revenue. However, the company reported that it was still facing cost headwinds, inflationary pressures, and labor shortages.
Michelle Gaskill-Hames, a senior executive at Kaiser, defended the company by asserting that its practices, compensation and retention are superior to those of its competitors, even though the entire industry confronts the same challenges.
President of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals of Southern California and Hawaii, Gaskill-Hames, stated, “Our focus for the dollars that we bring in is to keep them invested in value-based care.”
Thousands Of US Health Care Workers Go On Strike In Multiple States Over Wages And Staff Shortages
Despite the pandemic, she added that Kaiser only confronts a 7% turnover rate compared to the industry average of 21%.
“I believe that as a result of the pandemic, healthcare workers are completely exhausted,” she said. It was challenging to experience the trauma of caring for many COVID patients and dying patients.
The last labor agreement was negotiated in 2019, before the pandemic.
Hospitals generally have struggled in recent years with high labor costs, staffing shortages and rising levels of uncompensated care, according to Rick Gundling, a senior vice president with the Healthcare Financial Management Association, a nonprofit that works with healthcare finance executives.
Gundling noted that most of their revenue comes from government-funded programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. He says revenue growth is “only possible by increasing volumes, which is difficult under the best of circumstances.”
Since the end of the pandemic, workers requesting higher wages, improved working conditions, and job security have been increasingly inclined to walk off the job in response to employers’ increased need for labor.
The California legislature has sent Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom a bill that, over the next decade, would raise the minimum wage for the state’s 455,000 healthcare workers to $25 per hour. The governor has until October 14 to sign or veto the bill.
SOURCE – (AP)
