Largest Healthcare Strike in U.S. History Underway as Workers Protest Wages and Staffing Transcript

Welcome to the NewsHour. The largest healthcare strike in U.S. history is underway, after the nonprofit healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente and its unionized workers failed to reach a new contract agreement.

More than 75,000 healthcare workers walked off the job today at Kaiser facilities in five states and Washington, D.C.

So what’s happening is, Kaiser has not been bargaining with us in good faith, and so it’s pushing us to come out here and strike. We don’t want to, we want to just be inside taking care of our patients, but unfortunately, Kaiser’s not bargaining in good faith.

The strike is set to last three days as contract negotiations continue, focusing on wage increases and solutions to staffing shortages. Caroline Lucas is the executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, and she joins us now to talk more about this. Thank you for being with us. Healthcare workers taking to the picket lines, they’re fighting for better pay, better benefits. That’s certainly true in California, which has a high cost of living. It’s also where most of the 75,000 striking Kaiser Permanente workers have walked off the job. What specifically are you asking for?

Hi. I think that you’ve captured it. We are really looking for Kaiser executives to listen to the voices of frontline healthcare workers, as they raise to the forefront the short-staffing crisis that is impacting patient care within Kaiser Permanente.

Kaiser Permanente staff, they say that they’re exhausted. They say that the staffing levels at the Kaiser facilities are unsafe. Patient wait times, they say, are dangerous. Paint a picture for us of what an average day at a Kaiser office or hospital looks like right now.

Such a good question. I was just talking to folks in Colorado, and the receptionist in the audiology department was saying that people are often on hold for 60 minutes just to reach him. And then once they do get through to him, he’s offering them appointments two to three months out. And that same story is true across California and Portland and Washington, D.C. area, where patients are waiting for a long time just to speak to someone, to be told your next appointment isn’t for months and months out.

On this matter of staffing shortages, the healthcare industry nationwide is facing labor shortages, and here’s what a Kaiser executive had to say about that.

I think coming out of the pandemic, healthcare workers have been completely burned out. The trauma that was felt caring for so many COVID patients, and patients that died, was just difficult. And so people have left the industry as a whole.

So practically, what more could Kaiser Permanente be doing, in terms of recruiting and hiring staff, that it’s not already doing?

Kaiser Permanente has a huge advantage in that it has frontline healthcare workers who want to step up and work on long-term solutions to the staffing crisis, comprehensive solutions. Those look like infrastructure investment in the workforce, growing our own in terms of education and training, developing a pipeline for new healthcare workers to join Kaiser Permanente, and developing a robust wage and benefit package that not just attracts new people into Kaiser Permanente, but retains existing staff.

As we mentioned, this is a multi-day, multi-state strike. What do you see as the impact on patients who need immediate care? How will those folks get the healthcare that they might need right now?

I think that’s a question a lot of people ask, and what we would say is, frontline healthcare workers have been seeing patient care suffer now. Before they went out on strike, there were long waits in the emergency department, and patients were facing long waits to access care prior. And all of the wait times, all of the delayed care, compounds, and a situation that creates a real patient care crisis. So, we know Kaiser Permanente received ten days’ notice from us, which is both a legal obligation and an ethical obligation, to provide notice to strike. That’s an opportunity for Kaiser to fix the staffing crisis by negotiating good solutions. Having failed to do that, Kaiser executives will be spending lots of money on outside expensive companies to come in and staff facilities that could be staffed by Kaiser Permanente employees.

So specifically, what does Kaiser need to do to meet the union’s demands?

Kaiser needs to listen to the voices of frontline healthcare workers as they come up with long-term staffing solutions. Some of those solutions look like incentives to attract new staff into the healthcare field. It looks like providing training so that the right staff have the right skillset to deliver care. It looks like incentivizing off-shifts, night shift, weekend shifts, that are really hard to staff right now, partly because differentials haven’t changed in 30 years. And most concerning, we just heard from Kaiser Permanente an issue that rose up in the last 24 hours, that Kaiser Permanente is interested in outsourcing the jobs of healthcare workers that a year ago they were calling heroes.

And we should explain for the unfamiliar, what are differentials?

Oh, thank you. Absolutely. So shifts like night shift, weekend shifts, are harder to staff, they’re harder to attract people to, and they’re adding cost for workers of taking those shifts. And so they’re an incentive to work an off-shift.

Caroline Lucas, the executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, thanks so much for your time and for your insights. We appreciate it.

Thank you for your time.