Kaiser Workers to Strike Thursday

More than one thousand nurses and other healthcare workers at Sacramento-area Kaiser Permanente medical centers are expected to walk off the job Thursday as part of a statewide labor dispute between the healthcare chain and the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

The one-day strike will affect the Kaiser South Sacramento Medical Center and the Elk Grove Medical Offices, where many Elk Grove residents receive their care.

The union, which represents nurses, mental health counselors and optical workers at Kaiser facilities throughout California, is protesting proposed cuts in retirement and health benefits and what they describe as understaffing throughout the Kaiser system.

“Mental health professionals have patients that are under severe distress, with severe depression and sometimes suicidal ideations, that are forced to wait five or six weeks for an appointment,” said NUHW spokesperson Leighton Woodhouse. “They are not able to give care that they as clinicians feel is appropriate because Kaiser puts restraints on them in order to save money.”

Kaiser released a statement that did not address the union’s specific complaints but urged them to save them for the bargaining table. The two sides have been negotiating for about a year on new contracts for the union’s members in Northern and Southern California.

“We believe the bargaining table is the best place to resolve differences,” said the statement from Senior Vice President of Human Resources Gay Westfall.

The NUHW represents only about 30 health workers in the Sacramento area, according to Woodhouse, but they will be joined by a sympathy strike of the much larger California Nurses Association, which claims over 5,000 registered nurses members in the region. Statewide, about 23,000 Kaiser workers will strike Thursday, the unions say.

Westfall said Kaiser “is well prepared to continue providing high quality health care and service” during the strike.

Cathy Kennedy, a registered nurse and CNA member at the Kaiser Roseville Medical Center, said many non-urgent appointments originally scheduled for Thursday had been canceled. But she urged Sacramento-area Kaiser patients who need emergency care during the strike to go to the same hospital they would normally use.

“Don’t stay away,” she said. “If there’s a real emergency, we’ve got competent, skilled nurses ready to go inside.”

Kennedy said a “patient care task force” made up of nurses from various specialties, would be on call at each hospital to step in if needed in an emergency.

There will be no picket lines at the Elk Grove Medical Offices, but workers at that building will join a picket line outside Kaiser South Sacramento beginning at 7:00 a.m., Woodhouse said.