31,000 healthcare workers are on strike at Kaiser Permanente—and more may be joining soon

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Around 31,000 registered nurses and frontline healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente are on strike, demanding better wages and proper staffing among other things, and even more workers could be joining the picket line soon. The strike began on Tuesday and spans hundreds of medical centers and offices in California, Hawaii, and Oregon. And as we always do here at the Real News Network, we’re going to take you to the heart of the action and to the front lines of struggle right now and calling in from the picket line in Portland, Oregon. I’m speaking with Nick Ang today. Nick is a registered nurse, first assistant, and he’s the Executive secretary of the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. Nick, thank you so much for joining me today, man. I can see behind you, you’ve got the picket line going. I want to get right to it and ask if you could break things down for folks watching and listening, what is this fight about?

Nick Eng:

Thanks again for having me back, Max. It’s great to be here and today’s a wonderful day. There’s a lot of energy on this strike line. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There’s a ton of people on strike right now at Kaiser. What we’re fighting for is kind of the classic demands, fair wages, decent working conditions, and a say in how the work gets done. I’ll go ahead and break each one of those down. Let’s talk about fair wages. In 2021, the Alliance of Healthcare Unions and Kaiser Permanente came to an agreement that avoided a strike after a classic union busting tactic employed by Kaiser. And I’ll just be frank, the last two years, 23 and 24, we all received 2% raises. And for anybody who has a job and a bank account and families and a life to manage 2% raises over the past two years is not keeping up with inflation.

It’s not keeping up with the price of milk or eggs or gasoline or anything of that nature. So fair wages, we need to catch up from how far we’ve fallen behind. And there’s the inflation argument here, but there’s also, Kaiser has since negotiated significantly higher percentages than 2% with several other unions that they negotiate with. So we’re attempting to get parody with those raises and just ensure that the people who live and work in these communities taking care of our communities and each other, because we are also patients and members of Kaiser Insurance, are able to live a dignified life and make ends meet working conditions. Well, we’ve kind of been harping on this for a long time, but the problems persist. We’re not in the middle of a global pandemic anymore, but the entire landscape of healthcare and working in healthcare has completely changed. We continue to fight for safe staffing. We need to have enough providers to see the patients in a timely manner so that people aren’t getting delayed or canceled, and so that providers aren’t being double booked, things of that nature. I recall back in 21, we did a survey with our membership where at this point, nearly 5,000 of us working for Kaiser in the northwest here within O-F-N-H-P, and in that survey, the response was like 40 plus percent from our members saying yes to the question of are you considering leaving your profession entirely? So we’re in a bit of a staffing crisis and fair wages and good working conditions that are not causing moral injury to healthcare providers are two big things that will help us address this staffing crisis.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I hear in what you’re saying so many echoes of what we’ve talked about with you and other Kaiser healthcare workers over the years from the time when we were in the black depths of the COVID pandemic to now, and I wanted to ask if you could just say a little more about how it’s not as if things have just gone back to normal to the pre COVID days. I think a lot of folks in the country have experienced this firsthand declining quality of care and more frustration and higher costs with their healthcare. So I think there’s a broad range of anger and frustration with healthcare in America right now. And what do you as a union representative and a healthcare worker and patient yourself want folks to know about that? Why everything is sucking more from your perspective on the front lines?

Nick Eng:

Oh man, that’s a deep can of worms that we can open right there. Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, I’m having a great time, but I don’t want to be here right now. I want to be at work getting paid to take care of people who need to be taken care of. And I think if I asked anybody out here who is a healthcare worker and not a community supporter, because we have a bunch of that too, they would probably give you the same answer. Fundamentally, it seems like the obsession with money and profits and demonstrating growth to people with MBAs and financiers who have never touched a patient, it seems like that is kind of the inherent virus or cancer within healthcare in this country. You mentioned post COVID after being in this deep hole and then coming out on the other side of it, and it’s like things aren’t normal.

Again, an analogy I think of as like a fracture of a bone or some kind of sports injury to a tendon or something like that. Yes, you can go through the healing, but unfortunately what tends to happen is you enter into a new normal, and that’s what I think we’re in right now. A lot of the frustration increased wait times, it’s in my view, a lot of it’s due to system issues. I give the same care to every patient no matter what, but I’m a product of the environment in which I work. I’ll tell you a story that I heard from a provider in California. He’s part of our bargaining team. He’s a physician’s assistant, and he was making this very heartfelt plea to the entire bargaining body. He works in urology and he was in the clinic seeing patients one day, and it’s not an uncommon thing for these providers to be double booked or sometimes even triple booked.

What that means is this guy will have a patient in person and then in this same time slot where they’re pouring on more work, he’ll also have to fit in a phone call or two. And he recalls having to see a patient in the office finish up with that, and then went to call another patient. And the patient on the phone was understandably a little bit annoyed that it was delayed getting that call because, but moreover, this patient is a mechanic. This patient has urinary system issues such that they needed to have a catheter inserted into their bladder and they went home with it and they can’t work when they have a catheter in. And you can imagine the frustration in this patient talking to a physician’s assistant who was late over the phone when he’s worried about paying rent and you can’t remove a catheter over the phone.

That was really one heartfelt example, and the dude expanded upon. He’s working with people and talking to people and treating people. Sometimes they’re oftentimes on the worst day of their life talking to ’em about cancer diagnoses per se. And it’s so obvious that we should be talking to our providers and how appointments are scheduled and the amount of time we spend with patients is assigned. And what we’ve heard at the bargaining table is they don’t have any interest in that. They want to keep all scheduling processes, management’s rights, and it’s just causing a disservice for people who are consumers of the healthcare. It’s sad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is, and it hurts everyone involved except like you said, the people who are not actually in the room in the hospital. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what the response from management has been at the bargaining table to these demands and to the larger issues that you’re talking about behind those demands.

Nick Eng:

So I’m not so obtuse as to not recognize the process that we have made in bargaining. We have made some good progress on how the Labor Management Partnership will hopefully continue to proceed once we settle in agreements. I myself was a part of a bargaining team that develop some recommendations that will eventually turn into contract language around AI and implementation of new technology and ensuring workers have a voice in the implementation of that, that clinicians retain their autonomy over their decision making, et cetera. But the things we don’t agree on, well, as you can imagine, trying to do counter messaging to, Hey, you should talk to providers about how you schedule patients so that we can make sure that they get the care that they need in the appropriate way, in the appropriate place with the appropriate time. That’s not necessarily winning counter messaging for the employer.

So they’ve been pretty silent on that issue. As far as fair wages go, I’ll tell you at the national level, the latest proposal from Kaiser is 21 and a 5% over four years. Our latest proposal to them is 25% over four years, and that is primarily to make up for the percentages that we did not gain over the last two years where I’ll remind you again, we had 2% raises in 23 and 24. Now I’ve read a number of articles where Kaiser’s made a statement, and I actually just got mail from my employer yesterday delivered to my home. That was a letter touting how good their offer is and how there’s always enhancements and a PDF of like, look what striking will cost you. It was really funny. My girlfriend was like, should I feed this to the dog? And I was like, you know what?

Actually, I didn’t want to keep this. This is kind of funny. But anyway, the comms that they’ve made publicly are more or less calling us screed, saying that they have to balance affordability with fair compensation. And not even insinuating, just kind of flat out saying, if we were to honor this 25% proposal and agree to that, we’re going to have to raise prices on customers. It’s going to raise the cost of healthcare. And that’s the grossest part for me because it’s like there’s so many other things happening, and they’ve been posting profits and reserves in the billions with a B for years and years they’ve been acquiring and partnering with new health systems across the country. To say that a difference of 3.5% in an economic package is going to raise the cost of, for the entire insurance company in this country is just, it’s real gross because that’s, tell me how a difference of three and 5% makes the employer a charitable outstanding beneficence being, and 25% a difference of three and a half makes us greedy, belligerent, drunk professionals who don’t care about keeping things affordable. Tell me how that makes sense When the CEO makes over $7,200 an hour,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Unfortunately, I can’t, my man. And I imagine, again, there are going to be plenty of people watching and listening to this who identify more with what you and your fellow workers are saying than the plight of wealthy executives saying that they’re going to pass these wage increases onto us as customers. You can only make that argument so much in so many industries before so many consumers get screwed over by it, and they stop buying that talking point. So we’ll see how that all plays out over the course of this strike and other labor struggles happening around the country. But I wanted to sort of bring things back around to the picket line that you’re at right now. I know I got to let you go, but what is your final message to folks out there watching and listening about why they should care about this fight and what they can do to support y’all and end your fight for better wages, safer staffing ratios, more of a say in the jobs that you do, giving the care that you give to all of us?

Nick Eng:

Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you again for having me. If you’re in the Portland area, if you’re in California, if you’re in Hawaii and there’s Kaiser nearby and there’s workers on strike, come say hi to us on a strike line. Come chat with the workers here, what their thoughts are. These are your communities that we are the community. So come down, meet us. We’d love to talk with anybody. ONHB has a number of socials where we’re posting a lot of updates. The Alliance of Healthcare Unions also posts a lot of national bargaining updates on their socials. I mean, here’s what I’ll say. I was just talking about wages, for example, in the letter that they sent to me trying to get me not to strike it said, on average they pay employees like me 16% more than other health systems and in the Portland area for registered nurses. That is simply not true. You can go down the street to the university hospital and make double digits more as a nurse. It’s simply not true. And why those folks, those nurses, those professionals are being compensated at that level is because of the progress that we make is a labor movement. Those are unionized nurses as well, and they went on a long strike.

When we lift the bar for working people, it has an impact across this entire entire class of people, not just the industry. It’s a fight for the working class. So this affects everyone, and I’m not fighting to get rich or anything like that. I believe we should just take care of people. You know what I mean? There’s no reason we should have CEOs making 7,000 plus dollars an hour while I have members in my union who suffer from food insecurity or are worried they might have to live out of their car or something like that, which we did a survey for that before all this escalated to this point too. And it was a significant percentage of one of my bargaining units answered yes to questions like housing and food insecurity. So this isn’t just about healthcare. This isn’t just about healthcare workers. This isn’t even just about Kaiser. This is about fighting for everybody, fighting for a fair scrape at life, for working people, fighting for what’s right. Check us out on Instagram, Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals. We have a TikTok, got a blue sky. You can find us everywhere, O-F-N-H-P to get updates on the fight. Thanks everybody.