After 196 days on strike, Kaiser mental health care workers ratified a new four-year contract Thursday, approving a deal that delivers gains in pay and retirement benefits and delivers a little breathing room for istrative duties.
Though of the National Union of Healthcare Workers could vote on the proposed pact with their employer until one minute before midnight, the outcome was a foregone conclusion shortly after both sides announced a tentative agreement Sunday.
As of 4 p.m. Thursday, 1,937 had voted for approval and just 31 against. Given that the bargaining unit has about 2,400 , there was no way that a late surge of no votes would deliver a last-minute return to picket lines.
A synopsis of the contract’s main points released by the NUHW earlier in the day states that employees, including therapists, social workers and others, will receive 5.5 percent raises, retroactive to September 2024, and $2,500 bonuses when the contract is officially ratified. Another 5.5 percent pay bump is due in October, with a 5 percent increase in 2026 and 4 percent in 2027.
Those increases are 1 percentage point greater than Kasier’s last publicly disclosed offer listed online, which is dated Feb. 12, 2025.
In its own statement Thursday, Kaiser seemed to see the change in compensation as a bit of a victory.
“The union was demanding pay increases that would’ve meant wages that were nearly 40% above what others are paid in Southern California,” Kaiser said.
Retirement benefits also changed. Throughout negotiations, Kaiser stuck with offering mental health care workers in Southern California a traditional 401(k) savings plan with a 6% annual contribution and a match on up to 3% of employee salaries. But union said that they wanted a traditional pension plan similar to those that they said other Kaiser workers in other job classifications enjoy.
The two sides landed on a “cash balance pension plan” rather than a 401(k). According to the U.S. Department of Labor, cash balance plans guarantee a specified payout based on credits, generally a percentage of each employee’s annual salary, accrued in a separate for each worker with a guaranteed percentage that would be paid out on that balance in retirement.
“Increases and decreases in the value of the plan’s investments do not directly affect the benefit amounts promised to participants,” the Labor Department states.
Workers can also opt to take a lump sum of the ’s full value at retirement rather than taking guaranteed annuity payments for the rest of their lives.
By comparison, traditional pension plans pay a percentage on what was an employee’s final salary, or an average of their highest-earned salaries, when they were employed.
While the union lists the switch as a significant win, Kaiser’s statement downplayed the gain, saying that moving to a cash balance plan carries “the same cost” as the old 401(k) plan did.
And that’s likely true in the here and now, with the employer making annual contributions to employee s as they would have done with a 401(k) plan. But the union focuses on the future, stating that the cash balance plan “shifts the financial risk of a market downturn onto the employer instead of the employee.”
When the strike started in October 2024, workers were adamant that they receive seven hours per week of prep time each week to spend on istrative duties, arguing that workers in the same jobs in Northern California were already receiving such an allotment to catch up with emails, write patient notes and otherwise handle the behind-the-scenes work that is the overhead that comes along with counseling patients. At the time, the union said that Kaiser would only provide four such hours per week, and the company said in its own statements that going much higher would amount to paying workers not to see patients.
In the end, according to the union, more than six months on picket lines pried an additional hour from the company. NUHW says the guarantee is now five hours.
Kaiser and the union have been far apart in their rhetoric about demands for more prep time. While five hours seems like a relatively small part of a 40-hour work week, Kaiser continues to say that demands were much larger.
“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 ,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser said it engaged more than 13,000 mental health providers throughout Southern California outside its health care system during the strike. While union consistently accused the medical provider of failing to provide timely care, Kaiser has insisted that it was able to keep up with demand, delivering “a 10 percent increase in visits during the strike.”
