California:
Kaiser Mental Health Strike Continues

Apr 28, 2025

The strike of Kaiser Permanente mental health workers in Southern California has entered its seventh month, making it the longest mental health strike in U.S. history. The strikers are demanding cost-of-living wage adjustments, a pension plan and, above all, better staffing to provide timely appointments for patients and to ease the stress on workers.

Kaiser calls itself a non-profit company, to avoid taxes. But it acts every bit as ruthlessly as the big, for-profit health care companies it competes with. Kaiser short-staffs departments, limits wages and benefits, and increases premiums to amass profits—and uses those profits to play the financial markets, and to buy up other companies.

In 2024, Kaiser bought two big health care companies and reported nearly 13 billion dollars of profit—three times the profit it made in 2023. So, Kaiser could certainly meet the demands of its mental health workers also. But it is obvious that Kaiser is determined to break this strike and send a message to all of its workers: “If you stand up to Kaiser, Kaiser will crush you.”

Today, the U.S. working class is facing a deep, widespread mental health crisis, bred by exhaustion, poverty and despair. Instead of helping ease the crisis, Kaiser Permanente, this health care giant, is actually worsening it—not only by denying care to patients, but also by pushing its own workers into work overload, and more stress.