Massive strike at Kaiser Permanente enters third week with new unions joining the picket line

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got an urgent strike update episode for y’all today. An estimated 31,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawaii hit the picket line on Monday, January 26th in their ongoing battle with healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente to address workers’ demands for safe staffing and more manageable workloads that would allow them to give the highest quality of patient care without burning themselves out completely. The Unfair Labor Practice Strike is now in its third week, and thousands of more fellow healthcare workers have joined the picket line this week.

The Union, United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Healthcare Professionals, the acronym being UNAC UHCP, stated in a press release this Monday, February 9th, quote, “More than 3,000 UFCW represented pharmacy technicians, pharmacy assistants, and clinical laboratory professionals, also members of the Alliance of Healthcare Unions and all essential to safe patient care are set to walk out in their own ULP strike today at Kaiser facilities throughout Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and Kern Counties. When pharmacies and laboratories are short-staffed, patients feel the impact immediately. Delayed medications, delayed test results, and delayed clinical decisions, all of which can compromise care. UNAC UHCP members are joining UFCW locals 135, 324, 770, 1167, and 1428 and 1442 to send a clear and unified message. Kaiser must stop playing games with staffing and patient care and bargain in good faith for contracts that protect both patients and caregivers.

The strike is legal, necessary, and focused on patient care. After more than eight months of bargaining, Kaiser continues to stall while frontline caregivers face daily understaffing, burnout, and delayed care for patients. Instead of engaging meaningfully, Kaiser is attempting to undermine a democratically authorized strike and distract from its own responsibility to ensure safe staffing and timely care. Kaiser’s claim that investing in caregivers is “unsustainable” does not hold up. It has the resources to fix these problems and chooses not to. Chronic understaffing is what truly drives up costs and harms patients. Now, in response to the strike, Kaiser said in a statement that it released on January 25th that, quote, “Kaiser Permanente has been bargaining with UNAC UHCP and the Alliance of Healthcare Unions for more than seven months, the longest negotiations in national bargaining history to reach agreement on a new set of national and local contracts.

These negotiations come at a time when healthcare costs are rising and millions of Americans are at risk of losing access to health coverage. This underscores our responsibility to deliver fair, competitive pay for employees while protecting access and affordability for our members. We are doing both. Despite the union’s claims, this strike is about wages. This open-ended strike by UNAC UHCP is unnecessary when such a generous offer is on the table. The strike is designed to disrupt the lives of our patients, the very people we are here to serve.” Now, you can read the full Kaiser Permanente statement and the union press release in full using the links that we provided y’all in the show notes for this episode. But in today’s episode, as we always do, we’re going to take you straight to the front lines of the struggle so that you can hear directly from the folks at the center of it.

And I’m so grateful to be joined on the podcast today by Sanayo Kondo, a physical therapist at Kaiser Redwood City in Northern California, who is also on the bargaining team for her group. And we are also joined by Katie Gonzalez, an outpatient registered nurse at Kaiser who works in OB/GYN care and is on the board of directors for UNAC UHCP. And we are also joined by Lucky Longoria, a registered nurse who works in pediatrics at Kaiser Downey in California and who previously worked as a travel nurse. Thank you all so much for joining us on the show today, especially with everything that is going on over there. I truly appreciate it. And I know time is of the essence, so I wanted to start with a quick round around the table and ask y’all to first introduce yourselves a bit more. Tell our audience about yourself and the work that you do and why you are on strike right now.

Sanayo Kondo :

My name is Sanayo Kondo . I’m a physical therapist at Kaiser Redwood City in Northern California. I work with patients and help them recover from various illnesses and injuries, surgeries, strokes, brain tumors, et cetera. I’m on strike primarily because of staffing and burnout, as you mentioned. It’s gotten more and more difficult for therapists to be able to see their patients and help them in their recovery journey. I’ve been a therapist at Kaiser for 18 years, and I can say I’ve really seen the care model change quite a bit over the years. You used to be able to get in to see your provider relatively quickly and get back for a return appointment relatively quickly, but that model has changed a lot where now patients are having to wait weeks to months to get in to see their therapist because Kaiser measures itself on how quickly they can get the first appointment in.

So you can get your first appointment, but then what you find out at that appointment is, “Oh, well, we can’t see you again for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks.” And when you’ve had a knee surgery or a back surgery or a stroke, there is a small window of time when you need to be getting in those appointments to have the maximum benefit for the patient’s healing. And so it’s not good for the patients. They’re not recovering. They’re not getting to see their provider as frequently as they should be. But then on top of that, on the other side, on the provider side, they got into this profession to help patients. And when they have to look at their patient and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t have another appointment to see you for another six weeks,” that is really difficult and causes moral injury for the therapists themselves.

And being told by their managers, “Well, just tell them they don’t need to be seen for another six weeks and that’s fine.That’s what they need.” It causes a lot of distress. And so we’re seeing therapists leave because of that or sit in their car and cry before going into work because they don’t want to have to have those conversations with their patients.

Kadi Gonzalez:

So I’m Kadi Gonzalez. I’m on the board of directors for UNACUHCP. I represent 40,000 plus of our members proudly. And I’m also a registered nurse. I’ve been a registered nurse for 27 years. 11 of those years are at Kaiser. And I could tell you there’s been a huge shift from when I started with Kaiser to where we’re at now. It’s definitely not the same. It’s not the same employer. It’s exactly what my colleague just talked about. I work in outpatient, so there is a huge problem with access. I work in OB/GYN and we get patients calling us every single day wanting to get in to see a provider and we tell them every day, “Sorry, but we don’t have an appointment until three months.” And honestly, I’m not okay with that. And if it’s a patient that has pelvic pain that needs to be seen sooner, we have to send them to urgent care or we have to send them to the emergency room.

Urgent care has become an extension of the clinics. It’s basically an urgent care sees over a thousand patients a day at Downey. I mean, that’s the norm at Downey. They see over a thousand patients a day. It’s not an exaggeration. Again, patients, new members can get their first appointment, but to be seen by their provider.

It’s a big challenge. So I’m fighting and it’s not just about the access. We’re fighting for more staff. Kaiser has the resources. They have the money. They have close to 70 billion in reserves and we’re asking to hire more nurse practitioners, more physicians assistants, more midwives. Our advanced practice providers are currently double booked. That’s our normal template. They’re double booked, but they’re also triple booked at times. And so we want to input on staffing. That’s actually been our number one core issue is we want to input on staffing. The second reason why I’m out there is because Kaiser’s not saying in the fine print that they want to take away pensions and they want to decrease rates for Northern California brothers and sisters that joined our union two years ago. These are people that have worked for Kaiser for many years, but they joined our union.

They’re nurse anesthetist, physician’s assistants, nurse midwives, child life specialist, therapist. And basically they’re told that, “Hey, we want to basically cut part of your pension and decrease your wages by 20%,” which is unacceptable. I’ve rounded with hundreds of RNs. I said, even though they’re not coming for us right now, if we allow this to happen to one member to have their pension taken away, they will come for us later. So I’ve been able to mobilize a lot of people on the strike line because injury to one is injury to all.

Lucky Longoria:

Hi, my name is Lucky Longoria. I am a pediatric nurse at Kaiser & Downey. I’m inpatient. I have been a nurse for about 15 years, seven of those years I spent as a travel nurse. So I got to see an array of different hospitals and Kaiser Downey specifically was always my dream. So I will echo what Katie said. It is not the same Kaiser that I met. I dreamed so hard of landing at Downey, of being there for the rest of my career, of making that my permanent job. And then I got here and within a year of me getting hired, we were in a battle for our careers, of our careers.

When you come into a job and it’s your dream job, you’re expecting to land somewhere soft. You’re expecting to land somewhere that feels like family, and it does. I wasn’t expecting to land and hit the ground running preparing for the fight that this is. I know that out there in the media, Kaiser’s pushing that this is all about the wages and that couldn’t be further from the truth because I can survive with less money. I cannot survive if a mistake is made because staffing is not appropriate to the level of care our patients need. I could not live with myself if a mistake was made. So do we need more money? Of course we do. We all need to survive. Inflation, post- COVID, times are hard, but times would be harder for me if something happened to one of my patients and it could have been prevented.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I mean, this is just one of the most common kind of discussions that we have on this podcast across industries, overburdened, understaffed, underpaid workers and bosses who have just all had the same genius idea to just pile more work onto fewer workers and expect that nothing’s going to break. I was interviewing railroad workers three years ago who were all describing the same thing you’re describing, longer trains, fewer people on the trains, fewer people with less time to check the cars, all warning me that a catastrophe was going to happen if something didn’t change to this Wall Street minded monstrosity that had taken over the rail industry. Then as we know, Congress, Biden, everybody in Capitol Hill conspired to break a potential railroad strike. And less than three months later, the train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio happened. I was just there physically last week for the three-year anniversary of that disaster.

It’s on the railroads. It’s in our hospitals. It’s in our schools. It is why every dollar store worker you’ve ever met is at the end of their rope because they’re working long shifts with one or two people in those stores, retail all across the board. This is the struggle that working people are enduring on the job and all of us are hurting from it. It decreases the quality of life for the people doing the work. It decreases the quality of service of the people paying for those services. And yet all the while it is increasing the profits of the people at the top. And I’m not going to sermonize too much. I just wanted to lay that out for you guys listening because you’re hearing what I’m hearing, which is different versions of the same horrific story and something’s got to give here. And I wanted to dig in deeper on the story behind the signs on the picket line here.

And I wanted to ask if we could go back around and have y’all break down for us in more detail where this strike came from. Talk a bit more about the key issues that you’ve been facing as Kaiser healthcare workers, how you and your union have been trying to address those issues at the bargaining table and what Kaiser’s response has been.

Sanayo Kondo :

So when we tried to address workload and staffing at the bargaining table with our management team, one of the issues that came up was appointment length too, is the amount of time that we have to see patients. And one of the managers literally said, “Well, there’s no data showing that there is any link between patient satisfaction and appointment links,” which I just thought was wild. Okay, so five minutes, that would be fine. Why have the appointment at all if there’s no link or data? It’s just complete disregard for the patient’s experience and the patient’s care.

Another issue that we’ve been facing is the ability to use our PTO. Kaiser touts itself as having a great PTO program, which is great, but if you can’t use it, then what’s the point? So that was another piece that we were fighting hard for was just language that gives us the ability to use the PTO that we have earned because a lot of people are just told, “No, no, no, you can’t take that vacation without any reason behind it, even though no one else is off,” which again goes back to staffing because management keeps saying, “Oh, well, due to operational needs, I can’t give you that time off.” Okay, but nobody else is off that day, so clearly we’re understaffed.

Kadi Gonzalez:

So I want to address what’s been happening at the bargaining table. I’ve observed at both local and national bargaining, and it’s the complete disrespect by this employer. We spend hours waiting.That’s what it looks like. Hours waiting at the bargaining table, this is labor. And then the employer, if they show up, it’s very briefly and they won’t give any proposals. And they basically ghosted us prior to this lever being pulled, because let me tell you, our union used every single lever before we actually did an indefinite strike. That is not something we wanted to do. We don’t want to disrupt patient care. We want to be there taking care of our patients, but we’ve done media, social media, we did billboards, we did ads, we did informational pickets, we did walk on the bus with our politicians, our politicians were met with closed doors. And we actually did a short strike in October, a five-day strike.

And even then I was shocked that we even had to do a five-day strike, but here we did it because again, their lack of respect at the bargaining table. And like I said, we didn’t want to do this, but when your employer’s ghosting you for five to six weeks, and even after you give the strike notice of 10 days, because in healthcare it has to be 10 days, still they were just planning on hiring all the scabs. They were just planning that instead of working with us at the table. And then we’re on strike on day 17. And finally on day 17, they’re at the table for all 15 books. But you know what it took? It took UFCW to join us for three days to really shut it down.

It was our pharmacy techs, our pharmacy assistants and our clinical lab scientists. And they’ve joined us on the strikeline for three days. And let me tell you, it’s been a huge energy. It gave us a surgery because after two weeks of being on the strikeline, let me tell you, I’m going to be honest with you. As a registered nurse, it feels demoralizing to have to be on the corner to try to let the public know that the nurses and the healthcare professionals are out here. We want to be inside taking care of our patients, but our employer left us no choice. I mean, they literally left us no choice. And when you have a CEO that makes 7,500 an hour, I’m just going to come out and say it. I mean, their profits have expanded since our last contract and we accepted a subpar contract during COVID because we didn’t want to have to strike during COVID.

It was 2021 was the last time we did our negotiations. And we accepted, even though we were the healthcare heroes that risked our lives to go to work, and let me tell you, a lot of our healthcare providers even today still have PTSD over that. They do. It’s very true.

We’ve sacrificed, but yet we continued on, but now I’m at the point where I’ve personally survived cancer, I’ve survived working through COVID, I’m going to survive during the strike, but it is hard. It’s very difficult. I know we’re going to get into that, but it’s really difficult knowing that this employer has the resources, but they’re not willing to resource in the staff and our patients, the members that we already have. They’re expanding in all these other states and actually it’s typically right to work states. The latest one they’re expanding in is in Nevada. They’re expanding right now, but they’re growing. They’re clearly not in trouble. And let me tell you that we have a very symbiotic relationship. We do want Kaiser to sustain and survive. None of us wants Kaiser to go under. We would all love to retire with Kaiser one day, and we’re all patients of Kaiser.

So not just me, but my family, my husband, my two children, my father-in-law, my mother-in-law and my father. We’re all patients of Kaiser. So we want Kaiser to be successful, but I think at this point we’re tired of being exploited. I think that’s the underlying theme in America right now is we’re tired of being exploited. Right now there’s teachers. I was just on the phone call with my teacher friend yesterday.

We’ve been best friends forever and she’s like, they’re trying to get a feel whether or not they’re going to go on strike because they’re not even getting cost of living raises. And right now, currently in California, San Francisco, teachers are on strike. UTLA, the Teachers Union in Los Angeles, they just did a strike vote. And it’s the same thing, like you were saying with the railroad workers. It’s like doing more with less. They’re doing it for their students. We’re doing it for our patients. We’re trying to keep up with the cost of living. And the people on the top, they’re making the bulk of the wealth at the expense of our backs, our blood, sweat, and tears. So, and these are professions that are dominated by women. And I think women are like saying, “We’re fed up.” I may be honest with you, we’re fed up.

And I know all of us are providers. I’m a provider for my family. I’m the primary breadwinner right now for my family. So there’s a lot of frustration with us constantly sacrificing and it is moral injury, but I mean, that’s just, we’re done. We’re done with this. We’ve had enough. That’s what I’m seeing on the signs on the picket line. We’re seeing a lot about our Greg Adams CEO, not that … Obviously, we’re doing this for safe staffing and patient care. We’re seeing a lot of signs on that. Actually, I made a banner that’s a huge banner. It says, “Nurses save lives.” And we’ve been showing that on the freeways overpasses. We’ve been doing visibility brigades with our signs trying to get … And we’ve been getting community support, but the only way we’re going to … I mean, now they’re finally listening to us because another union joined us and now it’s really disrupting patient care.

The fact that our members, our patients can’t get medications, can’t get labs done in a timely manner, and they need their labs done to get diagnosed and to get treated. So I think you can sense the frustration that we’re going through. This could have been avoided had they just kept meeting with us at the table. That’s where we wanted it to happen. We didn’t want this to happen on the strike line.

Lucky Longoria:

I’ll jump in along with Katie. It’s hard to follow up with that because she hit all the bullet points, but from me, I’m inpatient and what I’ve seen is the lack of access to a seat at the table. We’re supposed to be partners, but we’re not. And if you’re not sitting at the table, you’re on the menu. And in the last two years, it’s in the patients of a profits report. Over 13,000 staffing objections were filed in a two-year period, 2023 to 2025. That’s when you have the time to fill them out. That’s when you have the time to sit down and say, “This happened. It needs to be fixed.” We’re kind of like the last line of defense between the hospital and our patient population. We’re the ones that notice when something’s awry. We’re the ones that notice when something could go wrong. And when you have that many staffing objections filled, and that’s minimal because we know there’s so many more that should have been.

Something is wrong. When your nurses and your healthcare providers are outside the building, something is wrong and we don’t take our oath lightly. We’re supposed to be at the bedside. We’re supposed to be in the clinics. We’re supposed to be with our patients taking care of them because our oath is first to do no harm. So if we’ve stepped away from our role, it’s because staying by them and not saying something, not standing up, not advocating for safer patient staffing, that does more harm. Staying in the hospital and not saying a word that does more harm. So it hurts. It hurts to step outside. I know that I’m concerned about the patients that we have. I’m a peds nurse and there are patients that have been there a month, two months. Walking away, I was worried, is she going to be okay? What’s going on?

Is she going to get discharged? I had a patient who got transferred to the PICU, the pediatrics ICU unit. I was worried about what was going to happen to them when I walked out the door. My job doesn’t end when I clock out.

My sense of worry, my concern, the heaviness I carry out with me when I know something’s not right, we don’t leave any of that at the door. So Kaiser’s painted a very broad picture of our greed, and they haven’t addressed any of the points that my colleagues have addressed. And the reason they don’t address it is because then they have to own up to it. They have to admit that they are trying to do more with less to save them money. They’re trying to admit that the bottom line is more important than the EKG line that’s showing us that a patient’s in distress. They are trying to pull the wool over our eyes because in doing so, they can hide their investments in sport arenas. They can hide their investments in prison and detention centers because this is no longer a place to get your care.

This is now an investment firm that dabbles in hospitals. So this has become a dangerous situation. And what we do with that information is so vital to how we as healthcare providers can provide care. I do want to say something because it coincides with the strike and how things feel. At the same time, we are in a parallel strike. We have been in a parallel strike with nurses in New York and nurses in Michigan, and we ourselves have nurses in Hawaii. And as much as this has been very, very heavy on the hearts of our coworkers, it has also been very inspiring to connect to nurses across the country. I have been very fortunate because I do a lot of our social media that I have connected with nurses in New York who have gone through what we’re going through and they’re two, three weeks ahead of us in their journey to a safer contract.

Having the connection with nurses across the country validates the fight that we are in because they are fighting for safer staffing, they are fighting for their wages, they are fighting so that their benefits and all the things that they earn being at their place of employment for 20, 30 years, so it doesn’t get rolled back. In Northern California versus Southern California, the wage discrepancy is huge. We are trying to close the gap not just on wages to make things equitable. We are trying to close the gap across the country so that when one hospital care system wants to pull the wool over their employees’ eyes, they can look across the board and you know what? We’re not the only ones experiencing this. So we have become mirrors to each other and we can catch things just a little bit quicker. I’ve had the nurses from New York message me, “This happened today.

It’s coming for you, ” because it’s union busting 101, and not only is it historic, has it happened before, it’s literally happening across the country, two weeks ahead of us with them. So having all of these strikes happen simultaneously Is validating because Kaiser’s trying to paint us as greedy. Well, you’re speaking of 31,000 healthcare employees and 15,000 across the country in New York. How are all of us? How are all of us greedy? How are all of us not invested in patient care and only invested in our pockets? And why is it that you can address this, but not address all the bullet points we have that deal with how the patients walk in and out of our care? So I know that it’s not a great thing to have so many healthcare providers out, but I feel like the journey brought us together and I feel like the journey gave us something to hold onto because we know we’re not wrong.

And as much as Kaiser has tried to gaslight us, it’s so reaffirming to see that it’s happening in other places and we can’t be wrong if we see it in other circumstances. And if I were to look at their circumstance, I would know they’re not wrong, they’re not being selfish, they’re trying to put patients before profits. And any kind of healthcare system that veers away from actual patient care shouldn’t be a healthcare system to begin with.

Sanayo Kondo :

I can share it too. In terms of being up in NorCal, the rehab therapists, we were a brand new group and the first to join UNACUHCP four years ago. So we were sort of all by ourselves out in NorCal and then now we have the other groups, the nurse, the anesthetists, the midwives and the physician assistants joining us. But in terms of our work, we don’t really interface with them much or we’re kind of siloed. So I think what’s been really amazing about this strike is it has galvanized our group because we’re decades behind SoCal in terms of just being in a union and what does that mean and the solidarity in the union. But I think being out there on the line and talking to a PA or a CRNA or a midwife or an acupuncturist, that we share the same issues and the same staffing concerns has been this amazing shot in the arm that I think has helped fast forward us and gotten us past the feeling of newness to have all these strikes and being out on the line together.

And it’s truly been heartwarming. And then also having members of the community come up and drop off donuts and even doctors giving us food and community members bringing us. They brought us, this one guy drove up and dropped off five boxes of pizza and I almost cried. So just those are brand new experiences to us and it’s been amazing and it’s really brought us together. And I think that solidarity is just going to grow from here for us in NorCal. So it’s really exciting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I want to talk about that a bit more because as I read in the intro, Kaiser Permanente has made their claim perfectly clear in the statement that they released in January on the strike where they said, “Despite the union’s claims, this strike is about wages.” I wanted to give each of y’all a chance to respond directly to that and explain a little more to listeners how the strike itself, the demands at the center of it, the working conditions, like how all of this is tied back to patient care and to the healthcare system that we all expect to take care of us when we’re sick or need care.

Sanayo Kondo :

Sure. I mean, I can definitely speak to the fact that Kaiser has only one talking point and that one talking point is about wages because they don’t have answers nor want to discuss any of the other larger issues. And in fact, they keep claiming that it’s the biggest wage hike in history and that’s not even true. There have been other wage hikes that have been even larger than the one that we’re asking for. And so that’s not even true on its own. And what Kaiser doesn’t want to share is the fact that a couple years ago they went to other large unions and offered them very large wage hikes in light of the fact that there weren’t big raises during COVID and then the historic inflation that no one could have predicted. So they went to other unions and said, “Hey, we get it. Cost of living’s going up.

We want to give you some very large wage hikes.” And then when UNACUHCP went and said, “Hey, we would like equal treatment and our members are facing the same issues as these other unions, and what do you think about giving us some raises in light of the historic inflation?” The answer was, “We’ll see you at the bargaining table.” And so what we’re asking for now, even though Kaiser wants to make it sound like we’re just being greedy and asking for these large wages, we’re just trying to catch up to these other unions. We’re just looking for wage equity.

Kadi Gonzalez:

So I mean, Kaiser’s claim about it just being about wages is completely false. We wouldn’t be out there because of wages. If you want to know the truth, we actually have zero income right now as we speak, and we’re on day 17. We’re sacrificing right now because this is bigger than what they claim. This is about staffing. This is about us being tired of being exploited. This is about us tired of doing more with less and being asked continuously to do more with less. We don’t want to give subpar care to our patients. We want to be able to spend time with our patients. We want to provide safe care. Part of providing safe care is having ancillary support, like having more nurses aids. A lot of times the nurses don’t even have nurses aids when they’re on the floors in the acute care setting.

Physical therapists, actually, they outsource a lot of physical therapy. All the therapy services right now, my in- laws are currently getting therapy. It’s not by Kaiser. It’s through an outsourced company, and we’ve been sounding the alarm for years, actually. I’ve been part of these meetings, these LNP meetings, these labor management partnership meetings. We’ve been sounding alarms like, “Hey, we need more therapists. We don’t want our therapists to be outsourced.” Right now, we have a shortage of nurse anesthetist and trust me, there’s not a shortage of nurse anesthetist. They’re going to other hospitals because other hospitals are paying more. So our CRNAs, this is for SoCal, and they’re actually part of another union under the Alliance, KPNAA. They’re leaving in droves. And then as far as nurses, Lucky touched on this, Northern California and Southern California, really big disparity. I mean, huge gaps in our wages.

And let me tell you, Northern California and Southern California, it’s expensive in both places. It’s not cheaper to live here in Southern California. We have San Diego, we have Orange County, we have Los Angeles. Even the Inland Empire is not cheap to live in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m from Orange County, baby. My folks all still live there in LA. I can confirm it ain’t cheap.

Kadi Gonzalez:

It’s not. And four years ago, we fought off a two-tier wage system. Four years ago, Kaiser came to us and said, “We want to give you a one.” This is during COVID. Okay. I want to take us back and it wasn’t too far to argue. In 2021, we were still in the thick of COVID. They were saying, “Here, you get a 1% raise and a two-tier wage system. Oh, but we’re not taking away from you guys. Just the people that are healthcare professionals are hired after 2023. They’re going to get 20% less.” And we’re like, “No, absolutely not. ” So we were this close last time, this close to going on strike in 2021, but we got a little bit more than 1% and we were able to get that two-tier wage system off the table. So we did accept it at that time, that contract.

Fast forward inflation, which is more like 8% to 9%. I mean, it’s higher than any 2% raise that we’ve received in these little lump sums. And then actually at the bargaining table for the therapists, I was appalled by this. For the Northern California therapists, they’re basically saying they just want to be paid like the Southern California therapists. And the response from Kaiser Management, and trust me, it left me speechless. They said, they’re talking about ours, our first part of our union, UNAC, which is the nursing part, United Nurses Association, California. We’re 50 plus years now. They’re saying, “Well, they’ve been in a 50-year marriage. You guys are newlyweds.” This is how they talk to them at the bargaining table. This is what we’re up against. And then we have registered nurses in Southern California and Moreno Valley because they’re under SEIU. Their claim is, Kaiser’s claim is, well, they’re with a different union, so they get, I don’t know, 10 plus dollars more an hour than our union.

We don’t work for our unions. We work for Kaiser Permanente. We all have the same employer, so we don’t understand why they continue. And we’ve been, I hate to say it, but maybe I’m just going to come out and be honest. We’ve been the nice union for a long time. We’ve been the nice ones, okay? Not that we’re not being nice now, but we’re just tired of it. We’re seeing that unfortunately we have to do this. I guess we’re being taught. UHW had to go on strike in 2023, which is part of SEIU. They went on strike to get their wages. In UHW, the mental health group, they were on strike for close to seven months. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. And they outsource a lot of mental health and they’ve been fine tremendously because they don’t provide good access to mental health.

And we’re basically, we’re sounding alarm basically. I mean, to see this many healthcare professionals on the picket line, and then we have another union joining us, USCW, who’s part of our alliance of healthcare unions. They’re actually trying to break us up. They don’t want us to be together anymore. I don’t think we touched part on that, but that’s another part of this fight, is we have over 60,000 of us that are part of the Alliance of Healthcare Unions, and they want to just deal with us separate. Why? Because they want to union bust us. They don’t want us to be together. So we started national bargaining back in May. We started local bargaining in March. We started national in May. And now that Kaiser’s saying, “We don’t want to deal with you on the national level. We just want to deal with the local.” And we’re like, “Wait a minute.

We’ve been at the bargaining table for national bargaining for months.” I mean, this is the employee we’re dealing with. And basically everything we love and hold dear is in that national agreement. Our pension’s in there, our medicals in there, our education time’s in there, our Ben Huddle, which is education stipends that we can get. Our partnership language is in there. I mean, everything that we hold dear is in that national agreement or across the board wages are in there, but they don’t want to give everybody the same across the board wages. They want to be able to basically deal with each union separate because they know we’re weaker if we separate. They want to divide us. This is all about union busting. Actually, this employer, to be honest with you, I have a hard time wanting to work for this employer because instead of meeting our members or meeting our union at the table, they’ve been sending these nasty messages, nasty emails to us.

On one side, they’re saying, “Oh, you can’t bully your fellow employees.” But they’re being a huge bully to us when they say, “Hey, if you go on strike, you might not be able to come back right away and you got to ask for permission.” This is the weekend before the strike. You’ll have to ask permission of your manager and they may or may not let you come back right away, right, Lucky? I mean, it was repulsive. And then of course, our members are freaking out because they’re like, but they can only afford it. None of us can afford to do this indefinitely. None of us can. I’m the breadwinner of my family. I’m the primary breadwinner of my family. My husband’s been on disability for two years. He’s a police officer. I have two children. I actually have my … I have three seniors living with me, my in- laws and my dad.

So we have family of seven living in my home right now, and none of us can afford this, but I can’t work for an employer without our contract. I cannot cross that picket line. I know I’m on the right side of history on this one because again, I’m willing to sacrifice. And a lot of our members are doing this right now. We’re sacrificing because we know what’s right and we’ve had enough of it. And this employer has a lot of resources. They have a ton of resources. They’re trying to play the game of outlasting us with all their money, but we have a lot of spirit. We have a lot of fight. And I mean, we’re willing to do whatever it takes, but hopefully we can get to an agreement sooner than later because our patients are suffering right now.

They’re suffering. We’re hearing about it right now. We’re hearing about bad things that are happening in the hospital. We’re hearing about long wait times for their labs or to get their medicine. We’re hearing a lot of stories and we just want to come back to work. Kaiser can correct this. We just want them to fix it and we’re willing to work with them. I mean, I still want to work for Kaiser despite all this. I’m hoping that we can get through this, but it is a little bit tough right now to work for this employer.

Lucky Longoria:

I know that the question right now is about Kaiser and how their talking point has always been wages, and we list off the myriad of concerns we have, and we can keep listing our concerns till we’re blue in the face, but I need to take it back just for a second. And it’s not something I normally dwell on because staffing, patient safety, that’s my priority, but I’m going to wheel it back just for a second. So what if? What if wages are important to us and why shouldn’t they be? We are in a pink collar job. We are predominantly female. So it’s like, oh my gosh, the audacity of these people to ask for what they’re worth, the audacity of these people to want to get compensated for caring for people. Why? Because caring for people has predominantly been a female task, a female task in the home.

So when someone’s a wife like Katie is, when someone’s taking care of their ailing parents, this is a job that women have always taken on and it is this unpaid labor that keeps the households of this country going.

And when Kaiser puts it out there that we are greedy, that our only focus is money while in their back pocket, they’re sitting on $66 billion in reserves. How do you even sit on $66 billion in reserves? You can’t. There’s no way to even spend that money in a lifetime. So if we’re not even asking, if we’re demanding what we deserve, what we should be compensated with so that we can live without having to work two or three jobs to survive, why is that a problem? Why is asking for what we’re worth a problem? It shouldn’t be. And I am so, so tired of having to pretend like me making a living isn’t important. Like me paying my bills is important. I understand that people are under the assumption that nurses, oh, they’re sitting on fat paychecks. Yes, we make a good paycheck, but in the economy that we’re in, even our good paychecks don’t make all ends meet.

So I’m okay being a little audacious and saying, no, I deserve to be paid a livable wage so that I don’t have to go and get a second and third job to take care of myself. I know that audacity is something that is frowned upon when it comes to females, because only men can be brazen and bold and audacious, and that time it’s done. It’s done. And this is a pink collar job because someone labeled it pink, but this is what puts food on the table. This is how we put our kids through school, how we take care of our parents. So we are community members just like the patients we take care of. And if we’re going to have our head on straight, when we walk in the door and we clock in and we take care of a patient for 12 hours, we need to be fed, we need to be housed, we need to know that the problems that we have when we’re at home, that they can stay there.

I don’t want to be thinking about my bills when I’m pulling up a medication. I don’t want to be thinking about the next meal on the table. This isn’t the primary concern, but there’s nothing wrong with it being a concern. And there’s nothing wrong with us voicing that this is concerning. There’s nothing wrong with us telling Kaiser the fact that you’re not concerned about the lives that your employees live. How do you say Kaiser thrive when they’re fighting to survive? There’s no thriving when you’re not surviving. So I think we should be as bold and brazen as we can be, because if we’re going to be happy, if we’re going to stay at Kaiser and we’re not going to walk out because some other facility is paying their employees what they’re worth, Kaiser needs to step up to the table and do the right thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Preach, sisters. I thought that was all really powerfully put. And I could genuinely talk to all three of you for hours, but I know we only have a few minutes left and I got to let you go in a second. And I wanted to, in the final kind of couple minutes that I have you just round out by asking y’all where things stand now and what happens next. And as we always ask on the show, what can folks who are listening to this right now do to get involved? So any final thoughts you wanted to share on that, and then we will wrap up.

Kadi Gonzalez:

So where it stands right now, I’ve heard from people on the inside that patients are being diverted, women that are pregnant are having to go to other hospitals to deliver. They’re not able to be cared at our facility, but other hospitals are actually feeling pressure and they’re getting impacted. So I’ve been hearing a lot about that. Also, I’ve heard about some Sentinel events that have happened because we’re in the business of life and death. This is not something that our nurses are there to hold patients’ hands when they’re dying. And right now where we’re at right now is we have a group of people that are working in our hospitals that are just in it for the money and not there to care for our patients like we would care for our patients. And just the caliber of nurses that we’re hearing that are working there right now, they’re not high caliber.

And I don’t even like saying that about my own profession, but these are nurses we’re hearing that are like new grads, but they’re taking on the strike assignment or they’re not even experienced in the area that they’re claiming that they’re experienced in. So it’s dangerous right now. I’m actually telling people that are Kaiser members that if you need to go to the hospital, I even told my dad, he’s like, “Oh boy, this is a bad time to join Kaiser because he just joined in January.” I said, “Dad, you can get in to see a doctor in the clinics, but if you have to go to the hospital, we’re going somewhere else.” I am telling people that I know that have been Kaiser patients for a long time, do not go to any Kaiser hospital right now. If you need acute care, go to another hospital.

And that’s really sad for me to have to say that to people because again, we’re in the business of people’s lives. This isn’t a minor inconvenience. This is a big, huge disruption. And I mean, Kaiser’s playing with patients’ lives, so I want to be clear about that. Some of our politicians have been speaking up. They’ve joined us on the picket line. We’ve had patients join us on the picket line. Right now, I guess we’re asking our community, our patients to call membership services and complain. But then what we’re hearing right now is that they can’t even get through to make a complaint. I’m still waiting for Gavin Newsom. I’m going to call him out right now, our governor, and I like Avanewsome, but he’s been radio silent since we’ve been on strike and even before we went on strike. But our senators have been speaking up, Senator Padilla, Senator Schiff.

What else more can we do? So I mean, I would hate for another union to have to join us on the picket line. I would hope that Kaiser can wake up just by this week of having UFCW join us and say enough is enough on their end. They’re done. So thankfully, I’m cautiously guarded, but from what we’re hearing is all 15 tables are back, they’ve been called back to the bargaining table. So I’m hoping that we’re having real discussions to resolving to get to a fair contract, to get to these tentative agreements so we can move on because we all want to come back. I haven’t talked to a single healthcare provider that’s happy that we’re not with our patients. So what else can we do? I don’t know. You’re sounding alarm and we appreciate you interviewing us today. We’ve been doing other interviews and thank you for sounding the alarm and getting, I mean, helping for us to have our voices heard because of course the media is driven by our conservative administration right now and they’re not telling the truth.

They’re not projecting our voices as much. They’re starting to a little bit. But I feel like because of our administration, we obviously know we don’t have the support of our federal government, but it’s going to take just the ordinary citizens rising up. That’s how any change happens. So ordinary people speaking up saying, “This isn’t right. Kaiser, please take better care of our healthcare providers so they can take better care of us.” I think that’s what’s really going to be the catalyst for change. And I have seen a shift in our country, not just on political stuff, but there has been a shift of more people, ordinary people saying, “Hey, what I see is not right.” And they’re speaking up, people that never spoke up before. So I think that’s what it’s going to take.

Lucky Longoria:

Well, I’m far from ordinary, so let’s see. No, I want to echo what Katie said about using membership services, calling Kaiser, calling them out. I think that’s really important. But on top of that, especially if they’re having trouble getting through communicating to anyone at Kaiser, use your social media because we could not do an economic strike against Kaiser because they’re so big. Their pockets are deep. But what we can do is shed light on what their practices are. And there are so many patient stories right now starting to circulate via social media. So if you see a story like share, repost, keep the conversation going because we are an earworm. We cannot, cannot, cannot fight Kaiser where they’re at. We can’t because they’ve got money and we’re a union. And even though we seem big, there’s more money to be had when your practices are a little shady and we’re doing things by the book and it’s hard to do things by the book when the person you’re fighting disregards the rules.

They’re not dealing in truth or dealing in half truth and misinformation. So the only way that I see to counteract what they’re doing is to keep the stories out there. And if the stories aren’t being covered, we need to cover them ourselves. We need to share them ourselves. So having a platform like yours, having a platform on any kind of social media, it keeps the story alive and moving and that’s what we need because I’ve run across people who said, “Oh, I’m so glad y’all got past that from our October strike. They think everything is over and that was in the past. I got congratulated that the strike was over, that we got what we needed, and that’s far from the truth.” And the reason that they think that is because it died down and it wasn’t in the news anymore, if it was even being covered completely to begin with.

So I think hitting Kaiser where they can’t protect themselves in their reputation, because yeah, they can pretend nothing’s wrong, but pretending only lasts for so long and it’s going to start affecting them when people start pulling their memberships and go somewhere else. And do I want that? No. But is it necessary for patients to get their safe care to maybe go somewhere else? It might have to. We might have to rebuild and maybe we can rebuild it better. Maybe we can rebuild it better.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests, Sanaio Condo, Kate Gonzalez, and Lucky Longoria, all union members with the United Nurses Associations of California and Union of Healthcare Professionals, or UNAC, UHCP, and all currently on strike at Kaiser Permanente. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.