Last month, thousands of Kaiser mental health workers began going on strikes across multiple different medical centers in Los Angeles, San Diego, Fontana and Anaheim. The question that probably first comes to most people’s minds is wondering why these workers are striking against Kaiser in the first place.

According to CNN, the main reason why the strike was instated was because the Southern California mental health employees were not able to achieve a labor agreement with Kaiser that satisfied both of their interests. On top of that, other sources such as NBC have mentioned that the protesters were unhappy with their salary based on the company’s employee treatment. The protestors also claim that a lack of staffing due to peers leaving has made it a lot more difficult for them to have enough time to attend to patients in need.

Josh Garcia, a psychologist for San Diego Kaiser stated that “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.” 

Kaiser has addressed the strikes by clarifying that all of their mental health workers would still be able to have enough time throughout the strikes to take care of patients who are in need of them. Kaiser mentioned that they anticipated the strikes and publicly stated that (the strikes were) “entirely unnecessary and unfortunately not surprising. NUHW leaders have been threatening to strike since before we began bargaining in July. The union has been slow-walking negotiations, despite the strong proposals Kaiser Permanente has put on the table. The union’s proposals at the table have been overreaching and unreasonable.”

From what can be gathered here, it’s clear that the union had the intention of going on a strike against SoCal Kaiser for a long while before they began. It currently remains to be seen whether the strike union and Kaiser will be able to come to a full agreement on these matters anytime soon.