California:
Kaiser Strike Points to the Mental Health Crisis

Oct 28, 2024

Nearly 2,400 mental health workers, including therapists, nurses, social workers and addiction counselors, began a strike against Kaiser Permanente on Monday, October 21. This bargaining unit, represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, covers the southern half of California, stretching from Bakersfield to the Los Angeles and San Diego metropolitan areas.

The strikers are demanding better pay and a pension—to match, at least, what Kaiser agreed to for the same classifications of workers in Northern California, after they went on strike two years ago.

Another crucial demand of the strikers is better staffing. Mental health workers say that Kaiser regularly assigns them a dozen or more half-hour meetings per day with their patients. With the prep work before seeing a patient, and the paperwork afterwards, the workers are overwhelmed—to the point that some workers said they are now worried about their own mental health. Union officials reported that 25% of the 1508 therapists hired by Kaiser between January 2021 and August 2024 have left.

Kaiser has been neglecting mental health care for years; it was fined for it by the state of California back in 2013, and again last year. But fines don’t faze Kaiser, a company that has made nearly 9 billion dollars in profit in the past one and a half years alone, and is sitting on more than 54 billion dollars in cash reserves, according to Fitch Ratings.

Kaiser, which calls itself “non-profit” to avoid paying taxes, has amassed this huge fortune by denying its workers better wages and benefits, understaffing departments, gouging patients and denying them the care they need.

Other big health care companies do the same in the face of the worsening mental health crisis in this country. Health care is in the hands of capitalists, whose only goal is more profit.