Kaiser Wants to Cut Health Care Workers’ Wages. It Might Provoke a Massive Strike.
In ongoing contract negotiations, health care giant Kaiser wants to impose a two-tier wage structure — meaning a giant pay cut for new hires. Union locals representing 35,000 Kaiser workers have voted to authorize a strike in response.
Union locals representing 35,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente have authorized strikes. (Ted Eytan / Flickr)
At midnight on September 30, the national agreement expired between Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance of Health Care Unions: twenty-one locals representing 52,000 workers. Now, 35,000 of them have authorized strikes.
The heart of the conflict is a two-tier wage proposal, a rarity in health care. The company wants to create regional wage scales for everyone hired after 2022 — meaning a giant cut in pay.
Kaiser isn’t hurting financially; last year it netted $6.4 billion, and it even returned $500 million in CARES Act funding to the federal government.
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