LOS ANGELES – More than 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers are making preparations for a national strike to begin this fall as contract talks between the workers and the giant, non-profit healthcare corporation broke off Thursday without an agreement.

The workers are from multiple unions in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, Hawaii and the District of Columbia. Beginning in late July and continuing into August, union members will be voting to authorize their bargaining team to call the unfair labor practice strike. It would be the largest strike in the U.S. since the 1997 Teamsters strike at UPS.

Hello, this is Marianne Giordano your Executive Director/CFO from OPEIU Local 30 inviting you to a live Telephone Town Hall tomorrow Friday, July 12 at 5:30 p.m. to discuss Kaiser Permanente National Bargaining. We’ll also be taking your questions live. It’s free to participate, just pick up the phone when we call tomorrow around 5:30 p.m.

The call will go out to the members who have signed up for mobile alerts. If you have not signed up yet, you can still join in by calling (855) 756-7520, extension 49304 pound. That number can be used to rejoin the call if for any reason your call gets dropped.

If you have questions about how to join tomorrow’s call, you can contact the Local 30 office at 619-640-4840. Thanks!

Kaiser Execs Predict Financial Doom & Gloom

We all know that Kaiser has been making record profits — but they opened this bargaining session complaining “hard times” are ahead for the company.

They then presented their economic proposal that demands major cuts from us, including:

• Copay increases to $20;
• More outsourcing and automation of our jobs;
• Lower pay, elimination of pensions, less time off — starting with new hires, then we’d be next.

WE HIT THE BARGAINING TABLE WITH MOMENTUM

We entered bargaining this week with major momentum with members from every local of the coalition rallying to protect our patients and our families in our next contract.

WHAT KAISER WANTS:

Cuts to Our Jobs, Wages and Benefits. Kaiser wants us to agree to a contract with:

• The lowest raises in decades.
• Cuts to our benefits, including doubling our healthcare copays and coming after our retirement benefits.
• Continued outsourcing and automation of our jobs.

Dear KP and CSC members,

I am happy to report that Labor and Management have now agreed to sets of dates through May and June for National Bargaining.  We have agreed to follow the normal format of bargaining in two to three day sets, every two to three weeks.  We will also use sub-groups as in the past to take on issues and make recommendations to the Common Issues Committee (CIC) as we have done successfully in the past.