More than 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers began a three-day strike Wednesday morning, after they failed to reach a new contract deal.
The walkout started with employees in Virginia and the District of Columbia, where they set up picket lines outside Kaiser’s facilities. A majority of Kaiser’s workers are in California, where many of its unionized employees and those in Colorado, Oregon and Washington also began a job action.
The union members include support staff and other workers, including X-ray and lab technicians, sanitation workers who disinfect rooms between patients and pharmacy workers who help dispense medications. These workers attend surgeries, run imaging equipment and assist in outpatient clinics. Doctors and many nurses were not part of the labor dispute.
The previous contract expired on Saturday. Kaiser, a large nonprofit health system, provides care for 13 million people in eight states. Union leaders say this could be the largest strike by health care workers in recent U.S. history.
Patients in California are most likely to feel the impact of the strike, during which patients could experience delays in getting appointments, or procedures that are not considered urgent could be postponed.
Workers in Georgia and Hawaii will remain on the job, according to a Kaiser official, and walkouts are expected to be limited in Washington state. In Virginia and the District of Columbia, only pharmacists and optometrists are striking and are expected to return to work after a day.
“Tens of thousands of frontline Kaiser health care workers across the country are ready for an unfair labor practice strike at 6 a.m. today,” the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, the collection of a dozen unions representing the workers, said in an earlier statement. “Patients and workers need dramatic action now to solve the Kaiser short staffing crisis and to ensure our patients’ safety.”
Kaiser said it had “robust contingency plans in place to ensure…
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