Mental health workers now in the sixth month of the longest mental health strike in California history will protest outside Kaiser’s San Diego headquarters to demand a contract that will help fix the giant HMO’s broken mental health care system.
SAN DIEGO — Striking Kaiser Permanente mental health workers will travel from picket lines across Southern California Friday to protest in the streets outside Kaiser’s San Diego Administrative Building, joined by patients, elected officials and community allies.
WHO/WHAT: Street protest by striking Kaiser mental health professionals, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).
WHEN/WHERE: Rally and Protest begin at 11:15 a.m., Tuesday, March 25, outside the Orcutt Building, 4511 Orcutt Ave.
It’s been over five months since nearly 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health therapists, psychologists, social workers and psychiatric nurses went on strike in Southern California, determined to make Kaiser stop treating mental health care as a second-class service.
However, despite a majority of state lawmakers urging Kaiser to settle on the workers’ terms and evidence of large scale appointment cancellations, Kaiser executives still insist on maintaining inferior conditions for its Southern California mental health workers, which have resulted in record state fines, understaffed clinics and illegally long waits for appointments that often stretch over a month.
No negotiations have been scheduled since mediation broke down earlier this month. Kaiser remains unwilling to provide the same amount of time for critical patient care duties that it already gives therapists in Northern California or restore pensions that it took away from Southern California mental health workers a decade ago, but still provides to nearly all other Kaiser employees.
“It’s hard to stay on strike for over five months, but it’s harder to treat patients knowing that we don’t have enough time or staff to give them the level of care they need,” said Jim Clifford, a licensed clinical counselor for Kaiser in San Diego. “Kaiser is the state’s biggest private provider of mental health care and biggest violator of mental health laws. We’ve come too far to keep letting Kaiser treat us as second class and treat our patients like they don’t matter.”
The street protest in San Diego on Tuesday is the first in a series of actions this week, with protests planned in Pasadena on Wednesday and Bakersfield on Thursday.
Kaiser, which is sitting on $60 billion in financial reserves, provides mental health services for its 4.8 million members in Southern California. In 2023, the state of California ordered it to pay a $200 million penalty, including a $50 million fine, for mental health violations that included excessive appointment wait times due to the understaffing of mental health services. Kaiser was also fined $4 million in 2013 for mental health violations and later put under state oversight.
Since the strike began, NUHW has filed more than a dozen complaints documenting that Kaiser is further violating the rights of patients during the strike, making it harder than ever to access mental health services. The complaints show that Kaiser is:
- Illegally putting patients on 30-day appointment waitlists,
- Making patients wait up to 44 weeks for autism assessments,
- Cancelling group therapy appointments for thousands of patients including postpartum mothers, and
- Sending patients with severe mental health conditions to outside provider networks that aren’t capable of treating them.
“Kaiser has allowed the situation for patients to get so much worse because it won’t treat us as mental health workers on equal footing as other Kaiser employees,” said Josh Garcia, a Kaiser therapist in San Diego. “Mental health isn’t a profit center for Kaiser, but our work can save lives, and we’re going to fight until Kaiser values us and the patients we serve.”
Below are the three major issues that remain unresolved.
- Patient Care Time: In Northern California, Kaiser guarantees full-time therapists 7 hours per week for patient care duties that can’t be done during therapy sessions, such as responding to patient calls and emails, preparing for appointments, communicating with social service agencies, making charting notes and devising treatment plans. The lack of time for these tasks in Southern California is a major reason why therapists leave Kaiser, contributing to the HMO’s chronic understaffing issues. Still, Kaiser is proposing to only guarantee five hours per week, while therapists in Southern California earlier this month reduced their request from seven to six hours per week.
- Pension Restoration: Workers are seeking the same defined benefit pensions Kaiser provides to nearly all its employees, but eliminated for its Southern California mental health workers a decade ago. Over the course of a 40-year career, Kaiser mental health workers without a pension will receive nearly $2 million less in retirement dollars than Kaiser employees who still have pensions. Kaiser data shows that mental health workers without pensions are twice as likely to leave Kaiser as those with pensions.
- Fair Salaries: Workers are seeking to close the gap between themselves and therapists who provide medical care at Kaiser, who make up to 40 percent higher salaries. Instead, Kaiser is proposing lower raises for its mental health workers than it provided recently to its medical workers in the Coalition of Kaiser Unions.
