Thousands of Kaiser Permanente health care workers in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Virginia and Washington, D.C., began a strike Wednesday.
The strike has been approved in the Western states for three days and in Virginia and the District of Columbia for one day by The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, according to The Associated Press. The strike of about 75,000 workers continues a year of prominent labor actions.
Health care workers included among the strikers are vocational nurses, home health aides, ultrasound sonographers, radiology technicians, X-ray, surgical, pharmacy and emergency departments, the AP reported.
“They’re not listening to the frontline health care workers,” Mikki Fletchall, a vocational nurse from California said, per AP. “We’re striking because of our patients. We don’t want to have to do it, but we will do it.”
In August, unions for the Kaiser workers requested $25 hourly wages, with 7 percent increases each year for the first two years, followed by 6.25 percent increases each year for the next two years, according to the AP.
Kaiser Permanente has 39 hospitals nationwide and administers health insurance for about 13 million people and reported $2.1 billion in net income in the second quarter of this year, according to the AP. Michelle Gaskill-Hames, an executive for Kaiser, said the company’s compensation, among other features like retention and practices, are superior to others.
“Our focus, for the dollars that we bring in, are to keep them invested in value-based care,” Gaskill-Hames said told AP.
Labor costs have been hitting hospitals hard in recent years, a senior vice president with the Healthcare Financial Management Association, a nonprofit that works with health care finance executives named Rick Gundling said, according to the AP. Gundling said the majority of hospitals’ revenue is fixed and comes out of government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, resulting in revenue growth being “only possible by increasing volumes, which is difficult even under the best of circumstances.”
