By all accounts, NUHW’s members carried off quite a strike at
Kaiser last week. The one-week strike, which ended Monday morning, was honored
by nearly 100% of NUHW’s 4,000 members, according to Tasty’s sources.
Kaiser's patients and their family members
-- including public officials and a popular
newspaper columnist -- stepped forward and publicized their own horror
stories about Kaiser's under-staffed mental health clinics. Patients even brought
homemade signs and walked picket lines with the striking workers.
One county official -- who lost her husband to suicide after
Kaiser delayed his care -- sent this
letter of support to striking mental health clinicians.
NUHW has documented more than a dozen suicides directly
connected to Kaiser's excessive wait times and under-staffed clinics -- including
three suicides by the family members of sitting elected officials in California.
In Oakland, hundreds of workers gathered in front of Kaiser's
national headquarters and chanted, "No more suicides!”
Meanwhile, Kaiser's operating engineers joined workers in a sympathy strike. And firefighters
-- the first responders who care for many people in mental health crises -- volunteered
to
The Massachusetts Nurses Association donated
$5,000 to the striking workers.
The strike received massive press attention across the U.S.,
including this
piece on NPR's national weekend broadcast. The strike even got international
coverage like this piece published
in London.
And on a more humorous note... check out one worker's creative re-writing
of Kaiser's post-strike e-mail to workers. The original message, penned by two of
Kaiser's overpaid corporate hacks named GregAdams and Robbie Pearl, was so
jam-packed with corporate-speak and mealy-mouthed misinformation that the worker was compelled
to set the record straight by clowning its dishonest authors.
