MEDIA STATEMENT
May 8, 2025
National Union of Healthcare Workers ratifies agreement
Kaiser Permanente Southern California and NUHW will enter into a new 4-year contract.
Kaiser Permanente spent the last 9 months bargaining with the National Union of Healthcare Workers. We heard their concerns, shared ours, and continued to focus on delivering the care our members need and deserve, even while the union called the strike they had been promising before bargaining even began.
On May 4, we reached an agreement, which the union’s members, our employees, overwhelmingly ratified this week. It’s disappointing that in the same announcement of the contract ratification, the union continues to disparage our organization and misrepresent the facts.
The truth is that the key issues in bargaining were the union’s demands for much higher wages, a different pension, and much less time spent treating patients. Throughout bargaining, we continued to protect our patients’ access to appointments and to balance wage and benefit increases with the need to keep care affordable for our members.
The union was demanding pay increases that would’ve meant wages that were nearly 40% above what other mental health care workers are paid in Southern California. In January, we offered the union a 19% wage increase, which they rejected at the time. This final agreement resulted in a 1% adjustment to that offer.
The union demanded a change in their pension to a defined benefit plan. Instead, in our final agreement, we converted their existing defined contribution plan to a new design with the same cost, to mitigate concerns over escalating costs in the future.
The union demanded nearly 50% of therapists’ time be spent away from direct patient care, which would have significantly reduced the number of therapy appointments we could offer our members. In February, we presented our proposal for non-direct patient time, which offers a reasonable allocation of non-direct time balanced with our patients’ need for care. Our offer was not altered in the final contract agreement in May.
Importantly, the agreement includes provisions for a new model of care, which will build on the strengths of our existing model in Southern California. We’ve been able to provide timely access to exceptional care, which our members deserve and expect, in part through our extensive external network of more than 13,000 mental health providers. This network helped us ensure that during the NUHW strike, our patients in crisis received care 24/7, urgent needs were addressed within 48 hours, and patients with non-urgent needs were seen on average within 6 days — a standard that exceeds state requirements.
We successfully delivered a 10% increase in mental health care visits during the strike, thanks in large part to our high-quality external provider network. This success is part of the future way we will deliver care.
Although the criticism and misrepresentations by the union are disappointing, we are pleased to have reached this agreement and to have our mental health clinicians return to caring for our members and patients across Southern California.
