About 150 healthcare workers and nurses are picketing outside Kaiser's South Sacramento campus this afternoon, one of many similar demonstrations today at Kaiser Permanente's California facilities over stalled labor negotiations.
The National Union of Healthcare Workers has been in labor talks with Kaiser Permanente for more than a year over benefits and other provisions.
Union officials say thousands of healthcare workers and nurses, who have a contract but are picketing in sympathy for NUHW workers, are off the job and on picket lines today. Kaiser officials in the Sacramento area say that many of their nurses stayed on the job.
Kaiser officials say that about 80 percent of nurses crossed picket lines, while about 70 percent remained on the job at Kaiser's south Sacramento facility and on Morse Avenue in Sacramento.
NUHW member Charles Rios, a licensed clinical social worker at a Kaiser facility near the south Sacramento hospital, was among those who addressed workers over a microphone. "We love our patients, and we want to talk about benefits and salary. What happened to good people and good care?" he said. "Who's thriving? Not us."
Later, Rios told a reporter, "This is about basic respect. They want to take our benefits away. That makes no sense to me."
The California Hospital Association released a statement blasting the sympathy strike by nurses: "To call this a sympathy strike is absurd. It's certainly not sympathy for the vulnerable patients who are being abandoned by their caregivers so they can walk picket lines."
The nurses walkout is an "attempt to grow their membership and advance their political agenda," the CHA statement said.
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