Media availability with workers Sunday, October 20, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at NUHW’s Glendale office as picket signs are prepared for the impending strike.
Mental health professionals in San Diego will also be available for interviews on Sunday, October 20.
Glendale, Calif. – Nearly 2,400 mental health professionals will form picket lines outside Kaiser Permanente facilities throughout Southern California starting Monday, October 21, demanding that the nation’s largest non-profit HMO fix a mental health system that’s so broken, the state of California fined it $50 million last year.
The workers, who include psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses, addiction medicine counselors, licensed clinical counselors and marriage and family therapists, provide behavioral health care for Kaiser’s 4.8 million members in hospitals, clinics and medical offices homecare settings from San Diego to Bakersfield. Their contract expired on Sept. 30. There was no agreement reached during a bargaining session Thursday, and there are no additional sessions scheduled until after the strike begins on Monday.
“This is about equity for mental health care,” said Jessica Rentz, Kaiser therapist in Fontana. “We want to be with our patients, not on a picket line, but we can’t keep working in a system that treats mental health care like an assembly line job and denies us the time and resources to provide the care we know our patients need.”
Picket lines will run from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. during the first week of the strike, however most strikers will arrive after 8 a.m. Each picket line will have a lunchtime rally with elected and community leaders. Click here for a full list of picket line locations and times for the first two weeks of the strike.
Monday, October 21 picket line locations
On the first day of the strike, the two main picket lines will be:
- Los Angeles Medical Center, 4867 W. Sunset Blvd.
- San Diego Medical Center, 9455 Clairemont Mesa Blvd.
There will also be picket lines on Day One in Fontana and Anaheim, however, many workers at those sites will take buses to join their colleagues at Kaiser’s Los Angeles Medical Center to begin the strike.
Sunday, October 20 (prior to strike)
Los Angeles
On Sunday, access will be granted to reporters, videographers and photographers from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. as workers prepare picket signs at NUHW’s Southern California headquarters, 225 West Broadway, Suite 400, Glendale. To gain access to the building on Sunday, contact Maggie Sisco at 989-802–1261 or msisco@nuhw.org.
San Diego
Workers in San Diego will also be available for pre-strike interviews Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. To arrange an interview, contact Matthew Artz at 510-435-8035, martz@nuhw.org.
Substandard mental health care – particularly in Southern California
Kaiser has a long history of violating mental health laws and clinical standards. It was fined $4 million by California regulators in 2014 for denying members timely access to care, and fined $50 million last year, the largest fine in state history for violating mental health laws. In agreeing to the fine, Kaiser acknowledged 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…”
A 10-week strike by mental health therapists in Northern California two years ago forced Kaiser to provide significantly more time for patient care duties that can’t be done during appointments, while also increasing staffing and providing more services at its mental health clinics.
However, Kaiser management has refused to extend those gains to Southern California, creating in essence a two-tiered mental health system where patients in Northern California have better access to care and mental health professionals have more time to meet the needs of their patients.
Currently, Kaiser staffs approximately 40 percent fewer mental health workers who provide therapy sessions in its Southern California region, which stretches from San Diego to Bakersfield than its Northern California region which includes the Central Valley, Bay Area and Sacramento – even though Kaiser has about 200,000 more members in Southern California.
While Kaiser has increased hiring, it struggles to keep mental health professionals in Southern California, most of whom don’t have pensions or enough time to complete all of their patient care duties because they are back-to-back all day in appointments.
According to Kaiser data, one-quarter of the 1,508 mental health professionals who were hired by Kaiser’s Southern California region between January 2021 and September 2024 have left their positions. Of the 367 departed workers, 64 percent left Kaiser within 12 months of their hire date.
Over the past year, 40 therapists have left their jobs working for Kaiser in Southern California and taken telehealth jobs for Kaiser in Northern California, where they are paid more, given more time for patient care duties and receive a pension.
“Kaiser says all the right things when it comes to mental health care, but its actions tell a different story,” said Josh Garcia, a psychologist for Kaiser in San Diego. “Unless we strike, our coworkers are going to keep leaving and our patients are going to keep struggling in an underfunded, understaffed system that doesn’t meet their needs.”
Seeking Equity for Mental Health Care
To improve staffing levels and reduce turnover that disrupts patient care, Kaiser’s Southern California mental health professionals are seeking a contract that includes the same working conditions as their fellow Kaiser mental health providers in Northern California and comparable pay and benefits as their colleagues who don’t work in mental health. However, despite being under a state order to undertake “transformational change” of its mental health delivery services, Kaiser has rejected the workers’ proposals.
- Patient Care Time. Workers are seeking 7 hours per week for patient care duties that can’t be done during therapy sessions, such responding to patient calls and emails, developing treatment plans, communicating with social service agencies, taking notes and preparing for appointments.
Kaiser already guarantees 7 hours per week for full-time therapists in Northern California, but management in Southern California is only willing to guarantee 4 hours per week. Management is also falsely claiming that providing 7 hours per week would result in therapists not seeing patients for 40 percent of their work time even though that has not been the case in Northern California.
- Fair Pay. Workers are seeking raises that make up for several years when they received no cost of living raises and puts them on equal footing with comparable non-mental health workers at Kaiser whose salaries are up to 40 percent higher. However, Kaiser is offering lower raises than what it provided recently to members of the Coalition of Kaiser Unions.
- Restoration of pensions. A decade ago, Kaiser eliminated pensions for all newly hired Southern California mental health professionals, but not for any other employees. As a result, everyone at their workplaces — including doctors, clerks and janitors — all have pensions, and the only Kaiser employees who don’t are themselves and their fellow mental health workers. The lack of a pension results in increased turnover and undermines Kaiser’s mental health training program because Kaiser workers would have to give up their pensions to transition to mental health jobs.
“Everything we’re proposing in negotiations, Kaiser is already providing to the vast majority of its workforce,” said Adriana Webb, a medical social worker with Kaiser who specializes in serving patients with HIV. “If Kaiser is serious about transforming its mental health care system, it has to start by ending the inequities that harm us and our patients.”
Concern over massive appointment cancellations
When therapists went on strike in Northern California two years ago, investigators with the California Department of Managed Health Care found that Kaiser illegally canceled 111,803 therapy appointments. State law requires Kaiser to continue providing mental health care during a strike, just as it would be required to maintain medical care. Kaiser must arrange for patients to receive care from out-of-network therapists practicing in the community if Kaiser’s in-network therapists cannot deliver timely and geographically accessible care.
In a recent letter to the head of California’s Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC), NUHW Researcher Fred Seavey urged the agency to inform Kaiser members of their rights and perform real time monitoring of appointment cancellations.
“Given Kaiser’s documented track record, we are concerned that Kaiser intends to respond to the upcoming strike by employing the same methods it has used during previous work stoppages,” Seavey wrote. “Such methods would jeopardize the health and safety of Kaiser’s enrollees, many of whom are diagnosed with disorders that can have life-threatening consequences.”
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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.
