Kaiser Employees Approve Strike Plan : Labor: Union members seeking 5% raise over three years could walk out within 10 days.

With a war of words heating up Friday, union workers at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics put Southern California’s largest health maintenance organization on notice that they intend to strike within 10 days unless they have a new contract.

In three days of voting that concluded Friday, members of Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union voted 3,926 to 591 to approve the strike notice, a legal step required before they can take an actual strike vote when the present contract expires at the end of the month.

The union represents 12,000 workers, about one-third of Kaiser’s employees, and includes nurse attendants, X-ray technicians, office workers, cooks and housekeepers.

Even though doctors and registered nurses would not be involved, union officials said a strike would disrupt the delivery of health services to many of the 2.3 million members enrolled in the Kaiser health plan.

“We don’t know how they intend to provide health care if there is a strike because we are the work force,” said James Zellers, president of the local.

The union wants annual 5% pay raises over the next three years, plus other concessions. Like many other health workers, Kaiser employees complain that there are too many patients and too few medical workers.

After decades of uninterrupted growth, Kaiser suffered its first real membership decline in 1992, losing 33,000 members. Even so, it still managed to earn $290 million during the year.

Kaiser entered the negotiations asking union members to accept $11.9 million in non-wage benefit reductions. Earlier this week, Kaiser withdrew that proposal, but has put nothing else on the bargaining table, union officials say.

The union set the stage for the voting with a full page ad carried in The Times warning Kaiser that the union would make an effort to move thousands of Kaiser members into competing health plans as part of a strike action.

The ad angered Kaiser officials as well as some union members.

Kaiser countered with an ad of its own, saying Kaiser workers were already paid more than comparable health workers in Southern California, and distributed a memo warning that a flight of members from Kaiser could have a “long-lasting and devastating effect” on the company and “result in significant layoffs.”

Kathleen Barco, a spokeswoman for Kaiser, said the vote favoring a strike notice “is part of their negotiating tactics. We have a negotiating session planned for Monday and will continue talking. We really want to settle this.”

The debate over the union ad flared up Friday during strike voting at a Paramount union hall when SEIU members challenged union negotiators to explain the ad.

One union member said: “If people do switch to another health plan, it means there will be less of a need for me, and less of a need for the union. It doesn’t make sense.”

But Zellers said the union, which struck Kaiser for eight days three years ago, had to play hardball with Kaiser. He said Kaiser was in the unique position of making money if there was a strike, since it had already collected money from members and thus would be able to bank the salary savings of employees who walk off the job.

“We don’t intend to let Kaiser keep on making money,” Zellers said.

John Sweeney, president of the international union, which has 1 million members in the United States and Canada, said the possible strike action has national ramifications because health plans such as Kaiser’s are expected to be a key component in efforts to create a national health care system. He said Kaiser had a good year, earning $290 million, but instead of sharing a part of that with employees, it wants to use the money for expansion.

“They know that national health care is coming and that HMOs will be a big part of that. They are gearing up for a big part of that business,” he said. “If Kaiser is successful (in defeating the union), we think it creates a real negative situation for workers everywhere.”