Registered nurses and other unionized health care workers at over 500 Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics in California, Oregon and Hawaii agreed to end a five-day strike on Sunday as planned and return to the bargaining table on a new contract.
The coalition of unions, represented by the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP), has been advocating for increased wages, better retirement benefits and more robust staffing at Kaiser health care centers, but Kaiser Permanente said in a statement that the main issue was wages.
“While the Alliance has publicly emphasized staffing and other concerns, wages are the reason for the strike and the primary issue in negotiations,” a spokesperson for the health care provider said.
The union coalition represents the roughly 31,000 employees in a range of positions that include pharmacists, optometrists, physical and speech therapists, lab technicians and more who walked off the job on Tuesday.
The unions called for a five day work stoppage lasting through Sunday. In the Bay Area, workers went on strike and picketed at Oakland Medical Center and Santa Clara Medical Center.
Operations at Kaiser Permanente hospitals and clinics continued with about 6,000 contracted nurses that were brought in last week to support other physicians and managers who were not on strike, according to Kaiser.
Meanwhile, the national health care accreditation organization The Joint Commission updated its guidance last week on staffing standards, upgrading patient safety related to staffing to a requirement of accreditation, according to the union and a review its 2026 National Performance Goals.
“The Joint Commission has finally said what nurses have known all along: unsafe staffing is unsafe care,” said Charmaine Morales, UNAC/UHCP’s president and a registered nurse. “Employers like Kaiser can no longer treat staffing like a budget line. It’s now a national patient safety mandate — and UNAC/UHCP will make sure it’s enforced.”
The standard is outlined in the Joint Commission’s Goal 12 of its 2026 Performance Goals and requires that “the hospital is staffed to meet the needs of the patients it serves, and staff are competent to provide safe, quality care.”
The union alliance said its work stoppage had garnered public support and that the new standards would help negotiate an impasse on staffing levels that it has said are threatening patient safety.
Kaiser Permanente said it had offered the union a 21.5% wage increase over the next four years but did not address staffing concerns raised by the unions.