For the second time this year, Kaiser workers are forcing Kaiser Permanente to pay them a lot of money they were owed under their contracts.
Over the next two weeks, 69 long-tenured Kaiser mental health therapists in Northern California will receive nearly $1 million in unpaid longevity pay. Under their Kaiser contract, after 15 years in the bargaining unit, an NUHW member gets a 4 percent longevity raise.
But earlier this year, several workers noticed they hadn’t received the raise they were due. They informed stewards and organizers, who did their own calculations and informed Kaiser management that they needed to do an audit immediately.
The problem soon became crystal clear. For years in Northern California, a manager had to submit paperwork for a worker to get the longevity bonus, but Kaiser was supposed to automate the process under a provision of the workers’ 2022 contract agreement.
Kaiser stopped instructing managers to file the paperwork but it failed to program the longevity raise into its payroll system, so the raises weren’t taking effect.
“It’s unsettling that a major error like that could happen, but it’s a reminder that we have to remain vigilant and that it helps to be part of a strong union,” said Willow Thorsen, a licensed clinical social worker for Kaiser in Santa Rosa, who was impacted by the error. “Thanks to our advocacy, we got to the bottom of it quickly, and we’ll all be made whole.”
In Hawai’i, earlier this year, NUHW members realized that they should have received their full $5,000 bonus and ultimately forced Kaiser to pay it.
“The lesson is that it behooves us to scrutinize all the data that comes from management,” Rachel Kaya, a psychologist at Kaiser on Maui, said last month. “Clearly, we can’t always trust what they offer us.”
