Kaiser Target of One-Day Strike; Talks to Resume

Nearly 12,000 Kaiser Permanente service employees staged a one-day strike Thursday, forcing Southern California’s largest health maintenance organization to reschedule patient appointments and deploy top-level administrators as clerks, housekeepers and dishwashers.

Meanwhile, a federal mediator called the two sides back to the bargaining table, and a Kaiser spokeswoman said contract negotiations are to resume this morning between the giant HMO and Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union, whose members are expected to return to work today.

Thursday’s strike affected 70 Kaiser facilities, including eight hospitals, in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. Although urgent care was not interrupted, some patients were forced to wait longer than usual for service.

“I hope they didn’t forget about us,” grumbled Virginia Cretal, 31, of Moorpark, growing impatient as she and her 3-year-old daughter waited for 30 minutes past their scheduled appointment at the Kaiser Thousand Oaks Clinic. She and the child, who suffered from a cold, saw a doctor five minutes later.

At the chain’s flagship hospital on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the chief engineer was folding and stacking linens and a quality consultant was cleaning rooms. Executives, dressed in jeans and sneakers, were good-naturedly wheeling patients through the corridors while management analysts washed dishes in the kitchen.

Yet they were harried beneath their good humor. “I miss my employees,” lamented a weary Jeff Grosvenor, manager of the orthopedics department, who on Thursday doubled as an appointment clerk. At 10 a.m., he surveyed his empty office, took a quick sip of a soft drink and sighed: “This is my breakfast.”

Outside, several hundred pickets marched under overcast skies, chanting: “What do we want? Contract! When do we want it? Now!”

At noon, a caravan of three minivans pulled up, horns blasting. Nearly two dozen members of the union’s negotiating team piled out of the vans; they were greeted by cheers from the striking workers as a handful of doctors, clad in hospital scrubs, looked on with bemusement from an overhead walkway.

The strike began just past midnight Wednesday, hours after the rank and file voted overwhelmingly--5,432 to 1,228--to reject a proposed three-year contract. Although doctors and registered nurses were not involved, the union does represent other health care professionals, including vocational nurses and operating room and surgical technicians who walked off the job with X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists and other support staff.

Union leaders billed the walkout as a protest against unfair labor practices by Kaiser and said it is part of a long-range, aggressive strategy that may include a general strike. Should that happen, it would be the second such strike in three years by Local 399.

Jim Zellers, president of Local 399, said the strategy also includes asking fellow unions, including those representing state, federal and local government employees, to abandon Kaiser for other health maintenance organizations. Zellers said other unions “don’t want to contract with a health care employer whose labor practices are barbaric.”

Although there are a range of issues in the contract dispute, the union is particularly incensed about a letter of understanding--or “side letter”--that Kaiser proposed, which calls for the two sides to join to find ways to reduce costs, but gives Kaiser the right to make all final decisions.

“This strike is essentially over one issue: that letter,” said David Rodich, a field organizer for Local 399 who led about 300 pickets outside Kaiser’s Panorama City hospital.

Dee Dee Remijio of Fullerton, a pathology assistant and 10-year Kaiser employee who was pushing her 9-month-old daughter in a stroller on the picket line at the Anaheim hospital, said: “It is not a wage issue, it is a rights issue.”

However, salary is a sticking point in the negotiations, as are holidays and sick leave. The union is seeking 5% raises for its employees for each of the next three years, but Kaiser has offered a 3% raise in the first year and lump-sum bonuses of between $300 and $600 for the second and third years.

Kaiser had also proposed switching two regular holidays to so-called “floating” holidays, meaning that employees would not receive overtime pay for those days. And the Kaiser offer included a provision to reduce sick leave for new employees--a move that Local 399 negotiators view as an attempt to weaken the union by dividing the rank and file.

Kaiser officials say their offer is fair. Company spokeswoman Kathleen Barco said the HMO, which lost 33,000 members last year and is expected to suffer another membership decline this year, is being forced to reduce costs to survive in a competitive market.

A handful of union members apparently agreed.

“The way the economy is, I think we’re getting more than anybody else,” said one woman, who did not want to give her name. “If you look around, everybody is laid off and out of a job.”

But that was hardly the sentiment on the picket line.

“I’m a single parent. I have a child. I have a home that I’m paying for, a large mortgage just like everyone else,” said respiratory therapist Aggie Lopez. “This is costly and this is scary and really rough. But I’m willing to stand behind our beliefs and behind the union.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berkman, Jim Herron Zamora and Sara Catania contributed to this story.