Kaiser Permanente engineers in Santa Rosa stay resilient as monthlong strike languishes

You can’t miss what resembles a makeshift campsite at the northwest corner of the busy intersection at Bicentennial Way and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa.

It’s been there five weeks and counting. When you slowly drive by or stop for a closer look, as I did, it’s clear this is far from a recreational experience. As the sign hanging on front of one of two tents states, “Engineering on strike.”

The protagonists are the stationary and biomedical engineers employed by Kaiser Permanente, the big California hospital operator and one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health care providers.

Across Northern California, this is one of 24 picket lines including about 750 people represented by Stationary Engineers Local 39 of the International Union of Operating Engineers. They walked off the job Sept. 17 largely over compensation and feeling unappreciated.

“We all appreciate this place, but right now it seems that we are all just a number on a sheet,” said Jason Coester, assistant chief engineer at the nearby Kaiser medical center, a long football pass behind the nonstop picketing site, where 16 of the striking engineers work.

Coester, a 20-year employee, has grown up with Kaiser. He was born in its San Francisco hospital on Geary Boulevard. Nine years ago, doctors and nurses there saved the lives of his wife and son during premature childbirth.

Mingling in the tents and toting placards outside on the sidewalk in Santa Rosa for passersby who often honk their car horns and yell encouragement, these engineers are novel at walking a picket line. It’s the first strike for Local 39, a small bargaining unit of men and women who keep the Kaiser buildings and medical equipment running properly.

‘Not a sympathy strike’

“It’s our little shanty town,” said another 20-year stationary engineer Debby Clay, walking into the main tent to introduce a visitor to a few of her colleagues.

Since this is a 24/7 picket line, there are coolers of water and other drinks, plus rations of fruit, candy and other snacks. Supporters occasionally bring bottled water and coffee to add to the provisions. One good Samaritan surprised the engineers one day with burgers from In-N-Out for lunch. The main tent has a rolldown door to shield those inside from the elements. And there’s a portable heater ready to keep the overnight crew warm.

George Ortiz, a nearly 18-year stationary engineer, was sitting in the tent Tuesday with his smiling 4-year-old daughter who was helping herself to Halloween candy.

Ortiz, whose parents came to California from Guatemala, told me he remembers as a boy in the 1980s going to the picket line with his mom, a former Kaiser receptionist in south San Francisco.

He thinks it’s important for his youngest and older daughter, 9, to see for themselves what a union sometimes needs to do to stand firm. In other words, organized labor taking last-resort action trying to coax a sweeter contract from management.

In talking with a handful of Kaiser engineers over three visits, there appeared to be strong solidarity and resolve to stay outside on the corner until they get a new contract comparable to their peers in the area.

“This is not a sympathy strike,” Ortiz said. “We’ll be out here until we get a contract.”

Coester did tell me, though, “We don’t want to be here for Thanksgiving.”

Pay parity with peer engineers

When working, they are admittedly well paid, as he acknowledged. Journeymen — meaning trained and experienced engineers — earn $57 an hour, about $120,000 a year, health and other fringe benefits and company contributions to their pensions. Total annual compensation comes to nearly $180,000.

But their health care engineering comrades up the road at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital and across town at Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital are now paid about $3 more an hour, or $6,000 more a year.

After slogging through the coronavirus pandemic that lingers, the Kaiser engineers didn’t want to cede further financial ground and, therefore, when their old three-year contract expired last month they walked off the job.

They aren’t alone. Walkouts at U.S. hospitals have increased after 19 months of the grueling public health crisis. Frontline health care workers have been pushed to the brink. So far this year, there have been at least 30 strikes across the country involving health care workers, according to a labor action tracker at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Nonetheless, Local 39 union negotiators continue to meet weekly via Zoom video chat with Kaiser representatives to try and hammer out a new labor pact. A federal mediator joined the contract talks Friday to help break the impasse, but was not successful.

Shane Mortensen is one of the chief negotiators. In between bargaining with the giant national health care company that generated $6.4 billion in net profit in 2020, Mortensen walks the Santa Rosa picket line, too.

“All we want is pay parity for what other (health care) engineers in the area are making,” Mortensen told me.

“We’re just asking Kaiser to pay the same. They always have in the past. Now they are taking a dramatic turn and saying they want to pay less than everyone else. … But they won’t answer the question as to why?”

Carrie Owen Plietz, president of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and the company’s Northern California hospitals, said the striking engineers already are among the highest paid in their profession in the country.

“We are offering a reasonable wage increase, and no takeaways, but the union is demanding much more,” Plietz said in a statement. “As a bargaining tactic, the union has called an open-ended strike, seeking a significant increase in wages.”

Local 39 wants 3% to 4% annual raises in a new three-year agreement. Kaiser is offering 2% pay bumps plus a 1% annual bonus based on the respective salaries of individual engineers. Regarding annual pension contributions, the company has improved its offer from no increases over three years, to 2% in the first year and 1% in the second and third years.

Reggie Slater, a 19-year biomedical engineer, said although company officials “tell us they care about us and they want to get us back inside,” he’s suspect of their intentions.

Slater noted that with weekly bargaining sessions shorter than 30 minutes and their attempt to “put our backs to the wall” by offering a deficient new contract last month at the last-minute before the old one expired, he views that as “an ultimatum, not negotiation.”

To Mortensen, it’s broader than that. He’s known Kaiser to be a “tough negotiator,” and the union respects that. Still, in the past, ultimately, the union reached labor accords with the company.

Labor strife spreads

Although the health care provider has a history steeped in organized labor — “built by labor for labor” as he put it — Mortensen thinks “there’s a philosophical change at Kaiser.”

He alluded to the labor strife at Kaiser sites in other parts of California and across the country. Indeed, about 24,000 nurses and other health care workers on Oct.10 authorized a walkout. They are threatening to strike over pay and working conditions.

Workers in California and Oregon want Kaiser to scrap its two-tiered wage and benefits regimen, which pays newer employees less than veteran colleagues and offers them fewer health protections.

More than 50,000 Kaiser workers nationwide are making similar demands and have contracts soon expiring. Union leaders say more strike authorization showdowns could come in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Virginia, Washington state and D.C.

“Kaiser Permanente is moving away from labor,” Mortensen said. “That’s what I think is happening.”

Plietz, the Kaiser executive, sharply disputed that notion, saying the company has the “country’s longest-running and most successful labor management partnership in the nation.”

Kaiser rooted in organized labor

During World War II, 30,000 people worked for industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, making aircraft carriers for our nation’s war effort at shipyards in Richmond, Portland and Vancouver.

Kaiser persuaded Dr. Sidney Garfield to organize and run a prepaid group health care practice for workers at the San Francisco Bay Area shipyards.

When the war ended, the shipyard workforce quickly dwindled. There weren’t enough workers remaining as members of the medical group. Dr. Garfield and Kaiser wanted to keep the prepaid health plan going and so on July 21, 1945 they opened the Permanente Health Plan to the public. In 10 years, enrollment ballooned to 300,000 members in Northern California. At the end of 2020, there were 12.5 million Kaiser members nationwide.

The early success of the innovative health plan was mainly the result of support from unions. For example, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Retail Clerks Union were the driving force behind the health plan expanding to Los Angeles.

“From our founding, labor unions have played an important role in our efforts to give more people access to high quality care and make care more affordable,” Plietz said.

“As the largest health care union employer in the U.S. — with nearly 85% of our employees working under collective bargaining agreements — we have always strived to work cooperatively and constructively with the unions that represent our employees.”

Back at the Local 39 compound at Bicentennial Way and Mendocino Avenue, Coester, the assistant chief engineer at Kaiser’s Santa Rosa hospital, stood outside in between tents and offered a cut-to-the-chase summation of the five-week ordeal.

Union members are collecting $150 a week from a strike fund, a pittance of their wages. While union negotiators dicker with the company over annual pay raises and pension contributions, Kaiser is paying temporary replacement engineers to keep its buildings and the medical equipment inside them operating.

“Nobody wins,” said Coester, who’d love to see a new labor agreement before his wife’s birthday Oct. 29. “This is a lose-lose situation. … I don’t want to do this again, if I don’t have to.”

Send your tips and ideas as this column chronicles the local post-pandemic recovery to paul.bomberger@pressdemocrat.com. Call or text 215-237-4448. Or you can message @BiznewsPaulB on Twitter.