LOS ANGELES — Nurses and other health care workers set up picket lines at over two dozen Kaiser Permanente hospitals and hundreds of its clinics across California and in Hawaii Jan. 26, launching a strike against the Kaiser chain.
The central question for the 31,000 hospital workers is management’s refusal to ensure safe staffing levels and wages that keep up with inflation.
“When Kaiser says it doesn’t have resources to fix staffing, what we hear is that a nonprofit health care organization would rather protect an enormous financial cushion than protect patients and the people who care for them,” Charmaine Morales, president of the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, told the press as the strike began.
“Kaiser says it’s a nonprofit focused on people,” she said in a union report entitled, “Profits over patients.”
“Our patients and our members are living something else: not enough staff, too much work, delayed care, and preventable breakdowns.”
Kaiser raked in $7.9 billion in net income in the first three quarters of 2025, setting aside a $66 billion surplus.
“The main problem is short staffing,” Ebony Wallace told the Militant on the picket line at the Sunset Blvd. Kaiser Hospital Jan. 26. She’s been a charge nurse for nine years in the only locked mental health facility Kaiser operates in Southern California and vice president of the UNAC/UHCP there. “You want to come to work and say I’m giving quality care, but we don’t have the staff so there’s burnout.”
“The big thing for me is impacting patient safety,” David Verdiner, a nurse in gastrointestinal care at Sunset Kaiser for 10 years, said. “Patients have to wait three months to get into my department, and unfortunately every doctor has only a 20-minute window to see you. If it’s just a checkup, OK. But if you have something going on, it’s urgent. Attendance levels are suffering. They deny requests for days off you’re entitled to.”
As part of this ongoing fight, Kaiser workers held a five-day strike in California, Oregon and Hawaii last October.
Join their picket lines and show your support!