(Reuters) -Kaiser Permanente’s healthcare workers union has reached a tentative agreement with the company, the union said in a social media post on Friday, settling a dispute over staffing levels and pay that sparked the largest-ever such labor action in the medical sector.
Kaiser Permanente and the union representing healthcare workers resumed negotiations on Thursday, more than a week after contract talks broke off at the start of a 72-hour strike by 75,000 nurses, medical technicians and support staff.
Terms of the Kaiser agreement were not immediately disclosed, but higher pay and increased hiring to address what union officials called crisis-level staffing shortages topped the workers’ list of demands. The previous four-year contract expired on Sept. 30.
The company has acknowledged staffing shortages plaguing the entire healthcare sector, a consequence of occupational “burnout” from the pandemic, leading to more than 5 million medical workers leaving their jobs.
Short staffing and high turnover were among the final stumbling blocks left to be settled at the bargaining table, as were union demands for safeguarding current employees from “outsourcing” of their jobs to vendors and third-party contractors.
Union officials have said their demand for higher pay was another major point of contention, while the company had argued that it already led competitors in total compensation packages in every market where Kaiser operates.
Unions across the United States have grown bolder in their demands in the last two years, pressing for higher wages and better benefits in a tighter post-pandemic labor market.
(Reporting by Manas Mishra and Leroy Leo in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
