photo credit: Noah Abrams/KRCB
Kaiser employees and supporters
rallied in Santa Rosa during the
strike's final day, Friday, October 6th.

With the third and final day of a three day strike against Kaiser Permanente, the health plan giant announced a new set of labor negotiations has been scheduled for next Thursday, October 12th.

Striking union workers are seeking pay raises and increased staffing; and say low staffing is an issue for overworked employees, and hurts patient care.

Jeannie Gerbich, an ultrasound tech and SEIU member, spoke from a noisy and crowded corner outside the Kaiser Santa Rosa Medical Center Friday afternoon.

"I don't think any of us wanna be out here," Gerbich said. "We wanna support all these customers and members that are driving by in honking at us, and pretty happy for us right now, right? But the bottom line is we wanna be back in, but we wanna be back in the facility under the right conditions."

Striking employees plan to return to work Saturday morning, Gerbich said.

"I count on people being back on the facility 6:00 AM tomorrow," Gerbich said. "We've been out here three super hot days out of the month, right? And the bottom line is we do healthcare because we love healthcare, we love our patients, we miss our patients. I like being in the facility. And so I think we're super excited to go back in at 6:00 AM tomorrow."

Those "right conditions" Gerbich referenced, she explained.

"It's no outsourcing, right," Gerbich said. "Being fully staffed and just focusing on giving the access to our patients that they really need."

Kaiser says it's added 10,000 new employees last year. A goal shared with a coalition of Kaiser employees unions.

But Gerbich feels the claim doesn't quite measure up.

"I don't believe that they've hit that goal," Gerbich said. "In all transparency, if you open up a new facility and you put new hires in, that doesn't speak to Northern California, Southern California, Hawaii, Denver, Colorado, and Oregon and mid-Atlantic states. We wanna see the effects of that in each and every facility."

Mental healthcare workers at Kaiser struck over similar staffing concerns close to a year ago.

Whether or not another round of walkouts will be called as part of this current strike, remains to be seen.