Kaiser Walkout Ends; Clinics in O.C. to Re-Open

In a radical turnabout, striking technicians, maintenance workers and licensed vocational nurses at Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California hospitals and clinics voted Monday to accept a new contract offer and return to work beginning this morning.

The vote--4,118 to 2,592 in favor--ended an eight-day walkout over wages that began after a smaller number of workers voted overwhelmingly on March 30 to reject a nearly identical contract proposal.

Kaiser spokeswoman Janice Fowler Seib said workers at seven hospitals and 45 clinics in Los Angeles and Orange counties would be asked to report back over a staggered three-day period.

Some 1,000 supervisory and management personnel, including many from Northern California Kaiser hospitals, have filled in since 11,200 members of Service Employee International Union Local 399 went on strike April 2.

Kaiser’s 2 million Southern California members were forced to cancel or postpone most elective surgery. The number of patients in Kaiser hospitals was 45% of normal Monday and doctor office visits were 17% of normal.

Several hundred seriously ill patients were transferred to other Kaiser facilities during the strike.

Kaiser Permanente officials in Orange County plan to re-open today four clinics that were closed when the strike began, spokeswoman Donna Drasner said. Six other clinics and the Kaiser hospital in Anaheim had continued operating during the strike.

Local 399 President Jim Zellers attributed Monday’s sharp reversal of opinion to the fact that Kaiser provided far more detailed wage data to workers than it had given before the March 30 vote.

Zellers praised his members for their “solidarity.” However, he also noted that the workers who made the difference in Monday’s election were primarily stay-at-home union members who had not participated in the first vote or in picketing and were far less willing to risk a strike. Nearly 50% more employees participated in Monday’s vote, compared to March 30--many after being urged to do so by Kaiser supervisors who telephoned them at home.

Seib called the ratification “a true victory for all concerned” and said it balanced Kaiser’s concerns for its employees with pressure to keep soaring health costs in check.

News of the ratification stunned a sizable number of angry rank-and-file members of Local 399, who had defied their leadership’s recommendation to accept Kaiser’s initial contract offer and had voted against the second offer just as vehemently in the hope that a longer strike could make an economic dent.

“I could have held out longer,” said Dawn White, an ultrasound technician at the Kaiser hospital in Anaheim who voted against the contract. “I was not happy with it. But it’s history now.”

White and others who voted against the agreement complained that the new contract did not include additional money.

Seib acknowledged that the new offer, in essence, shifted some of the $44 million in raises proposed in the first offer to the second and third years and provided more specifics about raises for patient-care and technical employees, who are in demand throughout the industry.

Workers will receive raises ranging from 5% to 6% in the first year and 3% to 7% in each of the last two years of the contract. The new contract added “longevity compensation” for longtime employees and a guarantee that workers could use a floating holiday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Monday’s vote came after Kaiser and the strikers bargained several days last week with little apparent progress. On Friday night, Kaiser offered a the new proposal. At the request of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which oversaw negotiations during the strike, the union agreed to submit the offer to employees. However, it declined to make a recommendation to members on how to vote.

Reflecting the pressure on hospitals throughout the nation to find and keep patient care and technical employees, the new proposal offered a 34% increase over three years to radiation-therapy technicians, paying them nearly $21 an hour by 1992, and a 31% increase to licensed vocational nurses, bringing them to $13.80 an hour by the last year of the contract.

By contrast, a housekeeping attendant’s pay would increase only 17% over three years, to $9.33.

The Kaiser offer was superior to the average collective bargaining agreement now being negotiated by American labor unions. However, according to union health-care experts, it was less than the average raise being extended to health-care workers. And according to many rank-and-file members, the contract was unacceptable because it failed to make up for the 1987 contract.

Union members talked bitterly Monday about having accepted a three-year wage freeze in 1987 after Kaiser officials insisted that the company--the nation’s oldest and largest health maintenance organization--was in danger of losing its domination of the HMO market and needed to cut costs.

“You work so hard for the company because they’re so far behind,” said Ardy Washington, a senior membership clerk at Kaiser Sunset, who said she voted against the contract Monday.

Kaiser subsequently increased its market share--it now has 55% of the HMO members in California--and is still generally regarded as among the best-paying health-care organizations in the country, according to Cathy Schoen, a national health-care consultant for the union. She said the 1987 wage freeze in Southern California and a two-year wage freeze imposed by Kaiser’s Northern California facilities in 1986 represented a departure from Kaiser’s national pay patterns.

Local 399 spokesman Tom Ramsey said that after the 1987 contract, many employees felt betrayed by Kaiser when it embarked on a $5-billion capital expansion program to open 40 additional medical clinics and 10 new hospitals in Southern California over the next 15 years.

Workers said they also were upset by what they referred to as a “speed-up” by supervisors bent on further reducing labor costs and coping with personnel shortages. In 1988, Kaiser officials formally apologized to Southern California employees for an unpopular demerit system that was intended to curb tardiness and absenteeism. The system automatically doled out demerits based on time-card entries.

“The cynicism you hear from workers now--that’s a real qualitative change I have seen,” Ramsey said. “Especially the people in the center--the solid, stable, family kind of people.”

Times staff writer Ted Johnson contributed to this story.