Striking California Kaiser mental health workers call for expanding their strike, as 50 Kaiser workers in Hawaii are set to join them on the picket lines

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Kaiser mental health workers picketing in Northern California (WSWS media)

The strike by 2,000 Kaiser Permanente mental health professionals in Northern California continued through its fourth day Thursday. These psychologists, therapists, chemical dependency counselors and social workers are striking over years of deteriorating working conditions in San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento and San Jose.

A central issue that is emerging in the strike is the need for workers to break out of the isolation imposed on them by the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) and expand the struggle to health care workers not only at Kaiser Permanente but throughout the entire medical system.

On Thursday, it was announced that 50 Kaiser mental health professionals in Hawaii would be joining the strike on August 29 over inadequate staffing. A report yesterday in Courthouse News wrote: “The health giant’s accreditation in Hawaii faces ‘corrective action’ after clinicians filed a complaint documenting long wait times for mental health appointments. The National Committee for Quality Assurance investigators concluded these access issues are ‘a potential patient safety risk’ and said ‘Kaiser’s prior efforts to improve access have largely been ineffective.’”

This is a welcome development but raises the question why more Kaiser workers are not also being called out. Kaiser has about 149,000 health care employees plus 16,000 physicians in California. Some 700 Kaiser operating engineers in Northern California, who struck for three months last year, are still operating without a contract.

Last November, tens of thousands of Kaiser health care workers, primarily nurses, were poised to strike, only for the unions to cancel it at the last minute and force through a sellout contract with sub-inflation wage increases and no staffing guarantees. Nurses opposed to the sabotage of the struggle by the UNAC/UNHCP (United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals) formed a rank-and-file committee to fight to give the struggle new leadership outside of the union bureaucracy.

The possibility exists for a powerful unified movement of health care professionals against the unending assault on public health. However, this requires a fight by health care workers against the isolation of their strike by the health care unions.

Al, a mental health professional, told the WSWS that “burnout” was consuming the profession.

“We can’t give the care that we want to give,” he said. “We want to give patients timely appointments so that we can meet their medical necessities, but we can’t do that. We don’t have enough people, and appointments are three weeks, even a month, or a month and a half out. We just don’t have the staffing for it. We don’t have the resources, and we need more. We’re all stretched so thin, and people are leaving quickly.”

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