Kaiser Ready for Strike at Its Facilities : Labor dispute: About 1,030 employees are expected to walk picket lines in Orange County. Patients are being moved to unaffected clinics and hospitals.

More than 11,000 employees at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics in Southern California were poised to strike today after rejecting the latest contract offers from the nation’s oldest and largest health maintenance organization.

The strike, which was to begin at 12:01 a.m., affects seven Kaiser hospitals and more than 40 clinics in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Some of the health facilities were planning to close if their staffs of technicians, maintenance workers and licensed vocational nurses walked out.

Kaiser officials in Orange County set up a command post Sunday on the eighth floor of their hospital in Anaheim Hills.

“Actually, we’ve been quite well prepared, although this is not something that we were looking forward to,” said Dr. Kenneth Bell, Kaiser’s Orange County medical director. “There will be some dislocations for our patients. Since this does not affect (registered) nurses or physicians, things should be close to normal and we do want to provide the care people expect. We are just asking people to defer some of the non-emergency, routine stuff.”

Donna Drasner, Kaiser’s Orange County director of public affairs, said 1,030 of the employees expected to strike work in the medical plan’s Orange County facilities. About 167,000 of the plan’s subscribers are in Orange County, out of a total Southern California membership of more than 2 million people.

“Basically, we are closing outpatient medical offices,” she said. “This includes Fountain Valley, Irvine and our office in Anaheim at 408 S. Beach Blvd.”

She said a health appraisal unit in Anaheim will also be closed.

“We’re trying to talk to (health plan) members on the phone,” she said. “If they have an appointment at one of the closed facilities, they should not show up for their appointment. If their problem is urgent and their problem needs looking at, those who normally would go to Fountain Valley should go to our Huntington Beach medical office instead. Someone who would normally go to our Irvine facility needs to go to our Mission Viejo medical office.”

Drasner said patients would not need new appointments. “We’re handling them on a walk-in basis,” she said. “And we will still provide essential in-patient services at the hospital in Anaheim Hills.”

“We are also going to be using our Riverside medical center as a backup for inpatient operations,” she added.

Said union spokesman Tom Ramsey: “I suspect that service will be disrupted. . . . We’re telling folks to get the service they’ve paid for . . . just as they normally would, and once they’re inside, to encourage their doctor to do what he can to get them to settle.”

Although Kaiser and union officials had been negotiating since late January, the decision to strike came as a surprise, company officials said. On Friday, a union negotiating team recommended that its members accept a three-year, $44-million contract offer, but the proposal drew heavy criticism from rank-and-file members of the Service Employees International Union Local 399.

Many felt insulted by the offer, which would have guaranteed 5% raises for all employees in the first year, and 3% raises in each of the following two years, said union Vice President David Stilwell.

“There was a lot of anger and frustration in their voices,” Stilwell said, referring to union members who met in Orange County and rejected the proposal on a 3,067 to 1,474 vote.

“Some of these workers said they had not been given raises since 1984,” he said. “They basically heard the across-the-board wage increase schedule and didn’t want to listen any further.”

Kaiser officials said the rejection was based on unfounded claims and “poor communication.”

“It’s emotion talking right now,” said Kaiser Vice President Al Bolden. “No one has gone five years without a raise, even those who were at the maximum pay for their job classifications. I know that to be true.”

Union officials said their members’ discontent goes back at least to the early 1980s, when the number of companies belonging to Kaiser’s medical plan dipped. Kaiser employees were then told that they would have to endure small or no wage increases until the hospitals regained a stable membership, Stilwell said.

He added that Kaiser has since recovered its economic health and is now burgeoning with new subscribers.

“Members can see Kaiser has embarked on a $1-billion expansion program and that its profit margin has also grown significantly,” Stilwell said. “Workload has gone up two- and threefold, and employees are still being asked to sacrifice. They are taking it all pretty hard.”

Kaiser’s Bolden said existing union contracts guarantee that employees receive 3% more than the average wage at 12 Los Angeles hospitals that are used as a yardstick.

“In addition, we are offering them $44 million in raises over three years,” Bolden said. “That is a sacrifice?”

During the weekend, some of the medical centers began moving patients to unaffected Kaiser facilities in San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties. Also, those facilities sent replacement workers to Los Angeles and Orange counties, where they augmented staff sent from Northern California, where Kaiser is based.

“About 40% to 50% of our patient (population) is the level we think we can handle with our supervisors and substitutes,” Bolden said.

Critically ill patients were being transferred to other medical centers and to Kaiser hospitals not affected by the strike.