“These negotiations were like fighting a battle,” says Adrianna Webb, a medical social worker at Panorama City in Los Angeles and a member of the National Union of Healthcare Workers’ (NUHW) bargaining committee.

The 196-day strike of the mental healthcare workers is over, for now. The strikers, 2400 therapists, psychiatric nurses, social workers and psychologists, are employed by Kaiser in Southern California. Kaiser is the huge health maintenance organization based in California. The workers have won, again. The strike began on October 21, a temporary agreement was reached on May 4, 2025 and the strike was called off on May 5, 2025. The contract will go into effect retroactively from October 1, 2024- September 31, 2028.

“There’s no doubt that Kaiser remains hostile to mental health care and to us, they fought us every step of the way. But this is still the best contract we’ve ever won, even though it took us more than six months to win it,” said Jim Clifford, a behavioral health counselor who has worked for Kaiser in San Diego since 2001. “We didn’t just regain a defined benefit pension, we got our biggest raises ever and more than double the amount of guaranteed time for patient care duties.”

The new contract, retroactive to September 2024, includes raises of 20% over four years, and an additional $2500 signing bonus.

It includes a modified defined pension plan, a big step toward restoring the plan Kaiser took away, plus five hours a week of prep time.

This is a lot but not everything the strikers wanted.  The strike was also about equity, equity with medical health care givers and equity with mental health workers in Northern California. The strikers wanted seven hours prep time — “responding to patient calls and emails, making appointment notes, devising treatment plans and communicating with social service agencies, charting, timely visits, staffing problems, personal business, “It’s essential if our patients are going to get the follow-up they deserve —  and pay for,” says Webb. They got five hours, but no guarantee that major improvements in staffing will be forthcoming.

Kaiser’s strategy was the now familiar stall. They would let months pass without coming to the table.  When they did come, they’d have nothing on offer. The providers faced (and survived) the holidays without paychecks (though there were truckloads of toys from supporting unions). Kaiser didn’t care about the money, they have plenty of it. Its 2023 profits were $4.1 billion in 2023; it has $64 billion in the bank. Kaiser’s CEO, Greg Adams’ 2023 “compensation” was $17,268,060. “They spent far more money trying to break us than settling with us would have cost. They paid scab therapists $13, 000 a week,” says Clifford

Kaiser claims to be union-friendly; its roots are in collaboration with post-war unions in the nineteen forties. Tens of thousands of trade unionists are “members.” Yet, Kaiser defied these workers demands as well as virtually the entire Southern California labor movement’s call to “settle!” In this dispute “the Central Labor Councils in San Diego and Los Angeles sanctioned the strike, as did Orange County and the Inland Empire. All the CLCs were extraordinary in their ongoing support. The ILWU and UFCW 770 were also very supportive,” according to Sal Rosselli, President Emeritus of NUHW. The teachers’ unions, Communication Workers and the United Nurses Association of California can be added to that list.

Kaiser also defied widespread community and political support. This included the entire community of mental health care advocates. California Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire sent Kaiser a letter signed by 20 of his fellow senators. The letters cited reports that Kaiser was canceling therapy sessions at “an alarming rate” during the strike. They urged CEO Gregory Adams to “resume good faith negotiations with NUHW as soon as possible, and to agree to the union’s reasonable contract proposals in order to ensure the delivery of timely and appropriate behavioral health services to your patients.”

LA City Councilman Hugo Soto Martinez came often to picket lines and honored the strikers at an LA City Council meeting.

In the end, the NUHW members outlasted Kaiser — with picket lines from Modesto to San Diego – every day for 196 days, they never gave up. They held rallies at Kaiser’s Southern California medical centers. They blockaded the Sunset Strip. They held a hunger strike, putting their own health on the line in an ongoing effort to improve health care for patients and reverse Kaiser’s record of misconduct.

“I’m proud that we took a stand for mental health care and made gains for ourselves and patients,” Lourdes Cortez, a social worker for Kaiser in Bakersfield. “We stood up to a behemoth, and we kept fighting for as long as it took to get a contract we can build upon and make more progress toward full mental health parity moving forward.”

The extraordinary thing about this strike was that it really was a strike for patients and for the public’s health, a strike for mental health care parity, a strike in a time of an acute mental healthcare crisis in this country. Perhaps never before has depression and anxiety and increasingly suicide reached into the lives of so many people and their families — young people, elders, veterans, trans people, the list goes on.

And yet Kaiser fought, and even now, as I write, there are reports of retaliation. “Kaiser’s systemic behavioral health failures have fatal consequences for communities throughout Southern California and the entire state. There is no shortage of evidence that Kaiser’s mental health system is dangerously broken and has been for a long time,” says Rosselli.

And who to fix it, then? The millionaire class in the hospital and insurance corporations’ boardrooms with their hands on all the levers of power and control? Or those who do the work, managing it as best they can in circumstances, short of workers control, they cannot command? The answer, easy —  it depends on the audacity and courage of workers and their unions and the war that people like these and the NUHW are fighting every day in the trenches. We need to recognize them and support them.

+++

Breaking news…

NUHW Caregivers at West Anaheim Medical Center have launched a five-day strike after nine months of fruitless contract negotiations. “Our salaries have fallen far below the market rate, and so have our staffing levels and the level of care that our patients receive,” said Angel Francia, a cardiac/vascular interventional technologist, who works at the cardiac catheterization lab. “Prime Healthcare makes millions of dollars operating West Anaheim Medical Center, and it should be investing those profits into its workforce and the care we provide.”

The post The Battle at Kaiser Continues: Mental Healthcare Workers Win appeared first on CounterPunch.org.