Kaiser Permanente Reaches Pact With Unions, Averting Strike

(Bloomberg) -- Kaiser Permanente reached a tentative agreement with unions, averting what could have been the largest strike yet this year. The averted strike would have involved more than 30,000 workers from nurses and pharmacists to janitors and locksmiths.

The health-care company reached the agreement on a four-year contract covering 50,000 employees in 22 local unions, the Alliance of Health Care Unions said in a joint statement Saturday.

Workers were planning to walk out of hospitals across mostly the U.S. West Coast on Monday morning, a move that could have disrupted a health-care system recovering from the damage of the Covid-19 pandemic and as U.S. hospitals confront a new wave of infections heading into the winter.

“These were challenging negotiations, but this tentative agreement demonstrates the strength of our labor management partnership and the unique success it can achieve,” said Christian Meisner, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Kaiser.

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