Kaiser Roseville health care workers to protest staffing: ‘We are at our limit’
Health care workers at Kaiser Permanente’s Roseville Medical Center will protest outside the facility Thursday morning, calling for improvements in staffing and a reduction in outsourcing.
“As healthcare workers, we chose this line of work because of our passion to care for patients, but without enough staff, there’s only so much we can do,” said Olga Huizar, an emergency room technician at Kaiser Permanente Roseville Medical Center.
Kim Menzel, senior vice president and area manager for Kaiser Permanente Roseville, said that, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has made a monumental effort to support employees and meet their physical and mental health care needs, and Kaiser will continue to do so.
“This has included providing nearly $600 million in employee assistance to ensure that frontline employees had access to alternate housing options, special child-care grants and two full weeks of additional paid leave for COVID-19 illness and exposure,” Menzel said. “Late last fall, labor and management leaders recognized that year-end performance bonus programs for frontline employees could be a challenge to achieve in the pandemic, so we chose to recognize the dedicated efforts of our employees by providing at least a 100% payout of their performance sharing bonus.”
Huizar and other workers mounting the demonstration are members of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West. They say the company is having a hard time retaining workers, leading to longer shifts for remaining caregivers.
They are calling for incentives that will lure workers to stay and increased support for workers.
“We’re stretched so thin. We are at our limit,” Huizar said. “Healthcare workers are getting sick, going out on leave, or even leaving the field altogether. Kaiser’s response to short staffing has been to demand we work more and more hours with no additional support or recognition for our efforts.”
Menzel said she has nothing but admiration and gratitude for the dedication of Kaiser Roseville staff, and she acknowledged that workers have overcome long hours and difficult circumstances. While using experienced temporary workers as needed, she said, management also has launched an aggressive hiring campaign, recruiting 1,500 experienced nurses in Northern California and giving work opportunities to 250 graduates of Kaiser’s nurse residency program.
The company also partnered with SEIU-UHW, which represents mainly housekeeping, administrative, and support positions, to establish Futuro Health, a $130 million nonprofit dedicated to training to help meet the projected demand in California for approximately a half-million of these workers by 2024.
The Kaiser Roseville protest will begin at 10:30 a.m. outside the hospital at 1600 Eureka Rd. Roughly 8,200 SEIU-UHW members work at Kaiser hospitals, call centers and medical offices around the Sacramento region.
SEIU-UHW is part of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which signed a four-year labor agreement with the company in November 2019, so the activity is not a strike. With this and other rallies around the state, however, the coalition is moving to support another Kaiser labor group, the Alliance of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
Alliance unions representing roughly 24,000, including many registered nurses who work at Kaiser facilities in Southern California, authorized a strike in voting results announced over the weekend. Kaiser nurses in Sacramento, members of the California Nurses Association, are not members of the alliance and have not authorized a strike.
The alliance, which must provide Kaiser with a 10-day warning ahead of any walk-out, proposed 4% annual wage increases across the board and rejected what they described as a divisive company proposal that would create benefit and wage differences between new hires and current Kaiser employees.
Kaiser’s operating engineers, also members of the Kaiser alliance, have been out on strike since Sept. 18, said Mike Rainsford, a business manager for Local 39 Stationary Engineers, which represents about 700 members in Sacramento and elsewhere in Northern California.
Those engineers operate and maintain the entire facility, steam sterilization, fire life safety systems, emergency generators, lighting, electrical distribution, nurse calls, patient beds, operating tables, operating rooms, humidity and more, said Reinsford, speaking Wednesday from a picket line in Oakland.
Reinsford said that the engineers simply want a contract that keeps their wages in line with what their counterparts make at Sutter Health, Dignity Health and other large institutions.
In a post on the coalition website, leaders SEIU-UHW and other unions said their members had rejected a similar company proposal on tiered wages and benefits when they were bargaining.
This story was originally published October 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
