2,400 striking mental health professionals will be joined on picket lines in Northern California and Central Valley by 23,000 registered nurses who are holding a 24-hour sympathy strike
Kaiser is paying over $230 million in mental health penalties, yet the HMO is using A.I. to replace the work of therapists and reduce the quality of patient care
Picket lines will begin at 6 a.m. in Oakland and Sacramento; 8 a.m. in Fresno, Santa Clara and Santa Rosa
OAKLAND, Calif. — Kaiser Permanente’s 2,400 mental health therapists will be joined on strike lines Wednesday, March 18 by thousands of registered nurses, who share their concerns about Kaiser’s increasing use of artificial intelligence to the detriment of patient care.
The registered nurses, represented by the California Nurses Association, announced their sympathy strike today. Stationary Engineers, represented by IUOE, Local 39 will also hold a sympathy strike with mental health clinicians, who will walk picket lines outside Kaiser medical centers in Oakland, Sacramento, Fresno, Santa Clara and Santa Rosa.
“We’re proud to strike alongside registered nurses and engineers in the fight for human-centered care at Kaiser,” said Joshua Gibbons, a therapist for Kaiser in Sacramento. “Mental healthcare is about human connection, and Kaiser is recklessly forging ahead with untested artificial intelligence that it sees potentially replacing us and the care we provide our patients.”
Kaiser mental health therapists, who include social workers and psychologists, are holding a one-day Unfair Labor Practice Strike Wednesday in response to Kaiser deploying new technology to replace their work and diminish patient care standards. The approximately 2,400 therapists provide mental healthcare and addiction medicine treatment for Kaiser’s 4.6 million patients in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Sacramento regions.
Wednesday, March 18 Picket Line Locations:
- Oakland Medical Center, 3600 Broadway (At 11 a.m., therapists will march down Broadway for a noontime rally outside Kaiser Corporate Headquarters, Ordway Building, 1 Kaiser Plaza)
- Santa Rosa Medical Center, 401 Bicentennial Way
- Fresno Medical Center, 7300 N. Fresno Street
- Sacramento Medical Center, 2025 Morse Avenue
- Santa Clara Medical Center, 700/710 Lawrence Expressway
**NOTE: Picket lines in Oakland and Sacramento will begin at 6 a.m. and run until 2 p.m.
Picket lines in Santa Rosa, Santa Clara and Fresno will begin at 8 a.m. and run until 2 p.m.
The Unfair Labor Practice Strike is taking place as therapists, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, have been without a contract since September. Both sides remain far apart with Kaiser sticking to extreme proposals that would reverse patient care safeguards previously won by therapists and open the door to replacing therapist jobs with artificial intelligence and further outsourcing care.
“Kaiser has been punished and fined so many times for mental health violations, we can’t let it get away with further lowering patient care standards,” Kaiser therapist Emma Olsen said. “Our patients need human therapists, who can work seamlessly with their doctors and have enough time to do our jobs right — and it’s clear Kaiser doesn’t want to pay for that level of care.”
Despite having $67 billion in reserves, Kaiser remains a serial violator of mental health parity laws. In 2023, the HMO acknowledged in a $200 million settlement agreement with the California Department of Managed Health Care that “it lacks sufficient behavioral health providers” and that “This lack of clinical staff has resulted in excessive wait times for enrollee individual therapy appointments…”
Last month, Kaiser entered into a $31 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor over violations of mental health parity laws. Under the 38-page settlement agreement, Kaiser must reimburse patients who had to pay out-of-pocket for mental health treatment they couldn’t get from Kaiser.
Despite still being under both state and federal monitoring of its mental health services, Kaiser has refused to work with therapists to improve care and has invested heavily into artificial intelligence, including a program that records therapy sessions.
The upcoming strike is predicated on an Unfair Labor Practice charge therapists filed against Kaiser for unilaterally overhauling its system for triaging patients seeking mental health services.
Patients entering Kaiser’s mental healthcare system are no longer guaranteed to talk to a human therapist trained to ask the right questions to determine what kind of treatment they need and how urgently they need it. Now, many patients do phone screenings with telephone operators who read a script of questions and decide what kind of appointment patients should receive or fill out an online questionnaire and have a form of artificial intelligence make those decisions, even though studies show A.I. underestimates the severity of medical emergencies.
Since Kaiser moved away from having human therapists conduct patient screenings, therapists report seeing more patients who should have been seen immediately or assigned to a different treatment program.
“Kaiser executives say they’re not using A.I. to make patient care determinations, but they won’t say what technology is underpinning the online questionnaires that automatically determine whether patients require urgent appointments and assess whether they may be a threat to themselves,” said Carolyn Staehle, a therapist in San Francisco. “Whatever Kaiser wants to call it, it’s not a human being making these potentially life and death decisions, and it’s not the same level of care as being assessed by a licensed therapist.”
When it comes to AI, Kaiser is setting the stage to not just replace work done by therapists, but to replace therapists themselves.
In ongoing contract negotiations, The HMO is refusing to agree to the same language in its 2025 contract with Southern California mental health professionals stating that the intention of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, “is not to replace but to assist (therapists)in providing safe therapeutic and effective patient care and support.” When Northern California therapists on the union’s bargaining committee asked Kaiser management officials if their about-face on AI foreshadowed potential layoffs, Kaiser officials responded that they wanted “flexibility.”
“Kaiser is taking the humanity out of health care,” said Brittany Beard, a Kaiser therapist in the Bay Area. “We want to make therapeutic care more accessible, but not at the expense of patient privacy or patient safety. Kaiser should be working with us to improve its services, not trying to replace us so that it can mechanize them.”
Kaiser’s position on A.I. is one of several hardline stances in contract bargaining that would diminish patient care standards. The HMO is also seeking to:
- Exert unilateral authority to lay off therapists in order to further outsource mental health services, severing mental health care from the rest of Kaiser’s integrated services. Kaiser’s proposal even details severance packages.
- Reverse patient care safeguards therapists won in previous contracts including scheduling rules that reduce wait times for return appointments and give therapists enough time to respond to patient communications and prepare for appointments.
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The National Union of Healthcare Workers is a member-led movement that represents 19,000 healthcare workers in California and Hawaii, including more than 4,700 Kaiser mental health professionals in California.
