PORTLAND, Ore — Nearly 3,400 Kaiser Permanente workers in Oregon and Southwest Washington have formally announced that they plan to strike beginning at 6 a.m. Nov. 15, according to a press release from the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP).
The union said the primary issue is a lack of adequate staffing at Kaiser and in other healthcare settings. The strike is being called “due to harmful proposals put forward by Kaiser leadership during union contract negotiations,” OFNHP said. Thursday’s announcement serves as a 10-day notice to Kaiser that the strike will begin as scheduled unless negotiations improve.
The Oregon and Southwest Washington workers include registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants and lab professionals. They will join 32,000 other Kaiser workers across five states striking at around the same date. An additional 8,000 could follow, the union said.
Kaiser workers in Oregon voted on Oct. 11 to authorize a strike over issues including adequate staffing and higher pay, giving elected union leaders the power to call for a strike at any time. About 96% of the staff who voted said they supported authorizing a strike, OFNHP announced at the time.
“We hoped that simply authorizing the strike, holding rallies and other forms of collective worker and community action would push Kaiser to do the right thing, but they have continued to push proposals that would create dangerous conditions for patients and staff,” Jodi Barschow, a Kaiser Sunnyside RN and President of the OFNHP, said in a statement on Thursday.
In a statement, Senior Vice President of Human Resource at Kaiser Permanente Arlene Peasnall said in part, "The challenge we are trying to address in partnership with our unions is the increasingly unaffordable cost of health care. And the fact is, wages and benefits account for half of Kaiser Permanente’s operational costs."
Peasnall went on to say, "We are asking our labor partners to work with us to address this very real problem through an interest-based process, just as we have done with other challenges over the course of our partnership."