Employees Go On Strike at Kaiser HMOs : Health care: Workers walked out this morning after rejecting contract offer. Patients are being moved to non-affected clinics and hospitals.

Employees at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics in Southern California went on strike today, after rejecting the latest contract offers from the nation’s oldest and largest health maintenance organization.

The strike began at 12:01 a.m., as licensed vocational nurses, technicians and maintenance workers walked off their jobs at Kaiser hospitals in Panorama City and Hollywood; Kaiser officials expected that workers at five other hospitals and more than 40 clinics in Los Angeles and Orange counties would also leave their posts. Some of the health facilities were planning to close due to the walkout.

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 11,000 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 were among the 4,500 who rejected the proposal on a 2-1 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 non-affected Kaiser facilities in San Bernardino, Riverside, Kern 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.

Patients have been asked to postpone elective surgery, and “any type of care that would not result in harm if some time elapsed,” said Kaiser spokeswoman Janice Seib.

On Saturday, the medical group’s negotiators tried to persuade union leaders to extend the strike deadline so that patients could be transferred to fully staffed centers.

Kaiser has more than 1.5 million subscribers in the areas affected by the walkout.

“Over our 40-year relationship with the union, any time the bargaining committee has told us we have a deal, they have gotten it ratified,” Bolden said. “We expected the same this time. We simply did not plan for the workers to go on strike.”

Kaiser officials also failed Saturday to persuade the union to take a second vote on the contract offer. Bolden said terms of the proposal were distorted in the way they were presented to union members.

“I wouldn’t say that they had ill intent, by any means,” Bolden said. “It was a matter of miscommunication. I think, though, that with better information about the offer, the outcome of the vote would be different.”

No new negotiations have been scheduled.