No Progress Reported on Hospital Strike Issue

As the strike by more than 9,000 Northern California Kaiser hospital workers entered its second month, union and management negotiators met with a federal mediator through the night Tuesday and into Wednesday evening, but no significant progress was reported on the dispute’s core issue--a two-tier wage structure.

“We’ve had movement on lesser, non-economic issues,” said Kaiser spokesman Bob Hughes, listing agreements on layoff notification to employees, procedures for recall of employees laid off and subcontracting of work at new Kaiser medical facilities.

Both sides said it was too early to predict whether the current round of negotiations would lead to a settlement.

“We’re still very far apart,” Hughes said. “But for the first time since the strike began, we are making progress.”

Meanwhile, union officials have asked hundreds of labor organizations to drop their Kaiser medical plans and switch to other health plans if the strike continues.

“We’ve had commitments from 270 different locals to drop Kaiser,” said Maureen Anderson, spokeswoman for the Hospital and Institutional Workers Union, Local 250, which represents about 8,700 of the strikers. Unions representing another 700 Kaiser workers joined the strike early on.

An estimated 600,000 of Kaiser’s 2 million Northern California enrollees belong to unions.

Kaiser officials said the percentage of patients hospitalized at their medical facilities was running from 69% to 97% of pre-strike levels.

Strikers walked off the job Oct. 27 primarily over their objections to a Kaiser proposal for a two-tier wage structure that would put newly hired employees at facilities outside the Bay Area on a scale paying as much as 30% less than current workers receive.