Yesterday’s bargaining started with Kaiser rejecting proposals we had made on corrective action and on union representatives. They then surprised us with a wage proposal, offering annual increases of 5%, 4%, 4% and 4% over the term of a four year contract.
In our long history of bargaining, we have always made a wage proposal first and Kaiser usually waits until thorough discussion of every other proposal to even respond to our wage proposal. Also, this is the most generous initial offer they have ever made, although the amounts they are offering are lower than what they settled for with CNA in 2022, the Coalition Unions in 2023 and our NUWH SoCal unit earlier this year.
The fact that KP has made this wage proposal so prematurely indicates to us that other proposals they plan to make, particularly around workload and provider profiles, will be particularly onerous. We will not let this wage proposal distract us and plan to focus our energies for now on improving patient care and making our workloads more manageable.
With this in mind, we presented our comprehensive proposal on Workload Distribution and Provider Profiles. Our proposal clearly places patients and providers before profits by calling for the following:
- Ensuring work assignments can reasonably be accomplished during scheduled hours of work for all employees
- Prioritizing ongoing treatment for existing patients over constantly adding new patients
- Establishing mechanisms to effectively limit caseloads
- Providing true evidence-based treatment, not “Kaiserized” versions
- Giving providers more autonomy over their schedules, including sole authority to choose if and when patients are scheduled into FTKAs or cancelled appointments
- Maintaining and improving case consultation conferences
We also made revised or counter proposals on the following Articles in the contract: Non-Discrimination, Probationary Period, Professional Practice Committees and Safety. Kaiser agreed to our counter proposal on Probationary Period and we signed a Tentative Agreement that keeps the probationary period at 6 months for all regular employees, but changes it to the later of six months or 600 hours for short hour and per diem employees.
