Kaiser Braces for 1-Day Strike : Labor: 12,000 employees may be off the job today. The action would affect 70 facilities in L.A. and Orange counties, but doctors and nurses would not be involved.

With contract negotiations at a stalemate, Kaiser Permanente, the largest health maintenance organization in Southern California, was bracing itself Wednesday for a one-day strike by 12,000 of its employees, who were being urged by their union leaders to reject a proposed three-year contract.

As voting on the contract continued into the evening, a union spokesman said he was confident that the membership would turn down Kaiser’s offer and walk off the job at 12:01 a.m. today, when the current agreement expires.

“April 1 will not be April Fools’ Day at the Kaiser facilities,” said Joel Maliniak, spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, Local 399. “This is not a joke. Our message is to bring Kaiser to its senses.”

The threatened strike would affect 70 Kaiser facilities, including eight hospitals, in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Doctors and nurses, however, would not be involved; the union represents janitors, clerks, X-ray technicians, cooks and other support staff.

Kaiser officials said that they will ask managers to fill in for the striking employees, and that some elective surgeries and other appointments that are not urgent are being canceled. A spokeswoman said patients who have not been notified that their appointments were canceled should show up as scheduled.

“We’re prepared for what comes along,” said Kaiser spokeswoman Kathleen Barco. “We’re going to do our best to handle this.” She added that the HMO would beef up security at its facilities, a move she called “a sensible and routine precaution.”

The union is billing the one-day walkout as a protest against what it calls unfair labor practices by Kaiser. Although the planned strike appears, at least for the time being, to avert a longer walkout, the union says it is part of a strategy that may at some point include a general strike.

Should that happen, it would mark the second time in three years that the union has struck. In 1990, Kaiser workers went out on a nine-day strike. At the time, Kaiser and union negotiators thought they had a deal, but the independent-minded union members overrode their own leadership’s recommendation that they accept Kaiser’s offer.

This time, Maliniak said, the union is shying away from a general strike because the HMO profits when its employees do not come to work. Kaiser collects payments from subscribers in advance, and thus would earn money during a long-term walkout by banking the salaries of absent employees.

The union is seeking 5%-a-year raises over the next three years, plus other concessions. Early Monday morning, after a weekend of negotiating, Kaiser made its final offer--a raise of 3% for the first year and lump sum bonuses ranging from $300 to $600 in the second and third years, plus increases in shift differentials for nighttime work.

Each side says it is up to the other to present a new proposal.

“We’re always willing to hear from the union in terms of proposals, but we have put our offer on the table and we feel it’s a good offer, and we are really hoping the employees will say yes to it,” Barco said. “If they reject this, they need to come back with some sort of proposal and we’ll talk to them.”

Countered Maliniak: “We don’t see it that way at all. We’re ready when they come back with some serious contract proposals. We are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Serious bargaining has yet to even begin.”

While union officials will not disclose their full strategy, they ran newspaper advertisements earlier this month in which they threatened to encourage Kaiser members to join other health care plans--an action that Barco said would be tantamount to “biting off their noses to spite their faces.”

Barco said the HMO, which lost 33,000 members last year and is expected to suffer another membership decline this year, is trying to reduce costs as the health care marketplace grows more competitive. But union officials, pointing to Kaiser’s $290 million in earnings in 1992, say the giant HMO can afford the raises.

“They’re making money hand over fist,” said Maliniak.