Like the rest of the healthcare industry, Kaiser Permanente has been plagued with staffing shortages and budget shortfalls through and beyond the pandemic. This upheaval led to several high-profile strikes against the healthcare consortium, including in 2022, when the longest U.S. strike by mental health staffers ran for 10 weeks in California. That chapter ended with no meaningful results for workers and settled no core grievances, but that didn’t stop a Hawaii-based Kaiser strike from going longer at 172 days.
You would have been correct if you had guessed that the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions would not let that remain the “longest” record for long.
The latest Kaiser strike ends: Last week, Kaiser Permanente and the National Union of Healthcare Workers struck a deal to end a 196-day strike by mental health workers in Southern California. The new contract provides increased time for therapists to handle administrative work between patients, and the workers will receive 20% wage increases over four years.
Was this truly a win? Well, sort of. Reportedly, the union demanded 40% wage increases, which reveals a substantial difference in promises vs. results. And sure, both sides do go into negotiations with the expectation of some compromise on demands, but a 20% difference cannot be overlooked. Further, the union groused over how the contract’s new defined benefit pension plan is “not as lucrative as Kaiser’s standard pension plan,” although the new plan is one that workers will prefer over a traditional 401k.
Sadly, these less-than-stellar union results arrived at the expense of those striking Kaiser workers who picketed every day and then found themselves picking up additional jobs to make ends meet through a needlessly long strike that didn’t bring the results promised by the union.
Also, this still probably won’t be the end of the Kaiser vs. Big Labor saga. Back in 2023, multiple unions claimed to represent the interests of 85,000 frontline workers in several states by putting them on 40-facility spanning picket lines, and in 2024, the unions waged an open-ended mental health care worker strike in Southern California. What will 2026 bring?
Meanwhile, significant strikes are brewing at other health systems:
- 1,000 nurses at Wisconsin’s UnityPoint Health Meriter Hospital authorized a strike beginning on May 27. The hospital maintains that it’s offered a wage increase that would take full-time nurses up to an average of $108,900 salary within two years.
- 1,000+ physician assistants, technologists, and lab workers at Washington’s PeaceHealth Medical Group clinics started a 5-day strike this week. SEIU also delivered a strike notice involving physicians with PeaceHealth declaring that they’ve already put wage increases from 15% to 36% over four years on the table.
As always, we’ll be watching the healthcare industry and how unions are pressuring hospital systems and threatening strikes that simply don’t benefit workers or their patients.
