IN RESPONSE to announced layoffs of 42 registered nurses and nurse practitioners from their outpatient clinics in San Rafael, dozens of nurses rallied at the Kaiser Permanente downtown office in the North Bay city on Thursday.
Concurrent rallies were held at the Kaiser Petaluma Clinic and the Medical Office Building in the Terra Linda neighborhood of San Rafael.
In a statement from the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, nurses said the layoffs are based on greed rather than necessity.
“It’s absolutely unacceptable that Kaiser made $13 billion last year, yet is cutting staff,” said Colleen Gibbons, a registered nurse in medical-surgical at Kaiser San Rafael and the chief nurse representative.
“These layoffs are not because there is no need for our care,” said Hunter Mills, a registered nurse in the Kaiser San Rafael special needs department. “The demand is greater than ever. The layoffs are actually all part of Kaiser’s grand master plan to keep pushing more and more patients to make do with telehealth, because it’s way cheaper for Kaiser to provide.”
Kaiser Permanente issued a public statement saying that the picketing is not a strike and does not impact operations or the delivery of care.
“At our San Rafael Medical Center, which employs nearly 2,500 staff and physicians, the volume of care in our outpatient settings increased significantly during the pandemic and has now shifted to other settings or locations. To match staffing to our members’ care needs, we are rebalancing resources,” the statement said.
The company said it recently notified the union and affected employees that the 42 positions will be eliminated by Oct. 14. Kaiser said it has been bargaining with the union and has reduced the number of affected positions to 41, and further adjustments may occur.
“There are 400 open nursing positions across the market, offering opportunities for affected individuals. We aim to help transition impacted employees to available comparable inpatient positions,” according to the company’s statement.
Lisa Maldonado, labor representative for the California Nurses Association, said they have been trying to get them to take layoffs off the bargaining table.
“It’s not true that they hired a lot of people during COVID,” she said. “It was post-COVID, when people put off basic care because they were afraid to come into the hospital, that more people started coming in. By that time, after not coming in for a few years, people were a little bit sicker.”
Maldonado said the hospital was ten months behind in colonoscopies, and now they are talking about cutting nine gastroenterology nurses.
“Same problem in dermatology and ophthalmology,” she said. “If somebody has a detached retina, they have to see somebody right away, they have to talk to a nurse. You can’t cut down your clinic staff so low that you only have one nurse. What if somebody stays home sick? They have it staffed so tightly that there’s little room for sudden changes.”
The next round of talks between Kaiser and the union will be on Monday.