11/6/2023 0 Comments Kaiser permanente strikeLabor experts also said Kaiser’s two-tier proposal to pay new hires significantly less was bound to anger workers and worsen staffing problems. “It does seem like a provocation,” Dean Eaton said. Other unions felt shortchanged to be offered less than that. Kaiser offered just 1%-a-year raise while its largest union, a service employees’ local representing 46,000 Kaiser workers, has a contract that calls for raises of 3% a year over the next two years. Several labor experts said Kaiser made some elementary bargaining mistakes that were bound to inflame its workers. Under Kaiser’s revised proposal, new hires would be paid 15% less than current workers. ![]() Facing a strike, Kaiser management increased its contract offer to a 2% raise in each of four years with a 2% lump sum payment in the contract’s first two years. Peasnall said Kaiser’s wages have risen to the point where its union members earn “on average 26% above the market rate”. “The fact is wages and benefits account for half of Kaiser Permanente’s operational costs.” “The challenge we are trying to address in partnership with our unions is the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare,” Arlene Peasnall, Kaiser’s senior vice-president of human resources, said in a statement. On September 2, 2019, Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers, patients and their supporters marched in a Labor Day protest in Los Angeles, California against the healthcare giants unfair labor practices and shift from prioritizing patients to profits. Kaiser overall has $89bn in annual revenues, 12 million health plan members, 39 hospitals and more than 700 other medical facilities spread across eight states and Washington DC. The partnership includes over 100,000 union members. Since Kaiser’s labor-management partnership was founded in 1997, none of its 35 union locals has gone on strike. We’re the ones who sustained the hospitals and took care of the sick like it’s a war zone.” The unions say Kaiser is seeking to squeeze wages when the non-profit company is doing well, with $45bn in cash reserves and $6.8bn in operating profits the last three years. “But their offer shows they don’t mean it. “They tell us we’re heroes and we’re much appreciated because of everything we did during the pandemic”, he said. “It’s a slap in the face,” he said, noting that the 1%-a-year offer was well below this year’s 5%-plus inflation rate. It certainly caused a strong reaction in Semanu Mawugbe, a Kaiser nurse in Los Angeles. “If they’ve decided not to do that any more, it’s going to cause a strong reaction among the unions.” “The partnership has been built on it being a leading payer in the market,” said Adrienne Eaton, dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, who has written about Kaiser. Saying that its labor costs were far above its competitors, Kaiser initially proposed raises of 1% a year for three years and cutting the pay of new hires to 26% below those of its current employees. The nurses’ union – United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care – complained that management’s latest employment offer would “depress wages for current employees and slash wages for incoming workers”. Higher minimum wages are among the issues that have been in play during negotiations.Last week one of Kaiser’s nurses’ unions served notice it would strike on 15 November, and soon after, several other unions also voted to strike. Wages also appear to be a significant part of negotiations, with the massive health system repeatedly insisting that it pays the best among its peers in markets where it does business. Workers say they are striking over low-staffing issues though Kaiser says it has worked to hire thousands more service employees since April. San Diego’s share of this nationwide demonstration is scheduled to unfold at five locations: Kaiser Zion Medical Center in Grantville, Kaiser San Diego Medical Center in Kearny Mesa, Kaiser San Marcos medical complex, and at its major medical office complexes in La Mesa and Otay Mesa. In 2016, a similarly imminent strike was averted at Sharp HealthCare when the medical provider and its nurses prevented a picket on the very morning that demonstrations were to start. In 2022, the California Nurses Association and Palomar Health found last-minute common ground, killing a one-day strike that was thought to be imminent. ![]() Recent history shows that late breakthroughs are far from impossible.
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