Kaiser reaches deal to end 10-week strike; mental health employees to vote on new contract
Kaiser Permanente and the National Union of Healthcare Workers representing the company’s 2,000-plus mental health clinicians announced Tuesday that they have reached a tentative contract deal that ends a 10-week strike.
In a joint statement on the new labor agreement, Kaiser and the union said: “The new four-year agreement will benefit Kaiser Permanente patients and drive collaborative efforts aimed at improving access to mental health care, while at the same time recognizing and better supporting mental health therapists in their important work.”
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg began mediating the dispute last week, and the union and company said he had helped to bring negotiations to a close. Steinberg has stepped in to mediate other negotiations, helping to head off an open-ended strike by NUHW in 2015 and more recently brokering a deal that allowed the University of California, Davis, avoid litigation that had sowed down development of its Aggie Square project.
NUHW members will begin voting later today on the deal, the union said, and that process will take two days. Both sides said they agreed not to discuss terms of the deal until voting is completed.
The two sides had come to terms on wages before Steinberg started to work with them, but union members wanted contract terms that would allow more time to tend to patient needs that could not be handled during therapy sessions.
This story was originally published October 18, 2022 at 12:57 PM.
