Overview

• The five-day walkout ended at 7 a.m. Sunday, with about 30,000–31,000 Kaiser Permanente employees returning to hundreds of facilities in California, Hawaii and Oregon.
• Regional negotiations are slated for Oct. 22–23, with national bargaining scheduled for Oct. 28–29.
• The central dispute is pay: the union seeks a 25% raise over four years, while Kaiser has offered 21.5% and maintains wages are the primary issue in talks.
• Union leaders continue to press for enforceable staffing measures, pointing to newly released Joint Commission standards that frame adequate staffing as a patient safety requirement.
• Kaiser said it maintained operations by deploying physicians, managers and nearly 6,000 contracted clinicians, though some services were rescheduled during the strike.