HMO to Provide Far-Reaching Job Protections

An innovative labor pact giving extensive job protections to 60,000 nurses and other workers at Kaiser Permanente was announced Tuesday by the giant health maintenance organization and a union coalition.

The agreement calls on Kaiser to avoid laying off workers, even when it eliminates jobs in certain operations, by retraining the affected employees or transferring them to comparable positions.

If Kaiser cannot find new jobs for dislocated workers, it is required to keep the employees on the payroll for a year. Although so-called job-security agreements have been crafted in the auto industry and elsewhere recently, such pacts normally permit companies to dismiss workers on short notice if the companies provide severance or early-retirement packages.

The Kaiser employment-protection pact is the product of a groundbreaking partnership established in 1997 between the HMO and a coalition of AFL-CIO unions to end years of labor unrest. It provided organized labor with a greater role in decision making at Kaiser while also calling for unions to help market Kaiser health care to union trust funds.

For Oakland-based Kaiser, the new pact could provide greater work-force stability at a time when many hospitals are struggling to fill openings for nurses and other highly trained workers. The AFL-CIO unions, for their part, win extra security for members concerned about upheaval in the health-care industry and worried about whether the strong market for health-care workers will continue. The pact, described as the first of its kind in the health-care industry, has no expiration date.

In a prepared statement, David Lawrence, head of the Kaiser Permanente organization, said that both the labor-management partnership and the new employment-protection deal give Kaiser “a strategic advantage.”

“With this agreement, employees have the security to participate wholeheartedly in streamlining and restructuring efforts without fear of jeopardizing their own or a co-worker’s job,” he said.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who met with Lawrence personally two years ago to bring labor peace to Kaiser, said: “Health-care workers want to help shape and create change in the workplace, rather than having it imposed on them. And with the knowledge and judgment that can only be gained from actually doing the work, they are best equipped to design and implement smart changes.”

The pact was criticized, however, by the California Nurses Assn., the biggest union at Kaiser to hold out against joining the labor-management partnership efforts. The CNA represents more than 7,000 Kaiser nurses in Northern California.

Jim Ryder, Kaiser division director for the CNA, said the language of the job-security pact provides weak safeguards for workers. He said, for example, that workers conceivably could be transferred to new jobs at Kaiser facilities more than an hour’s commute from their homes.

“We believe far more is being given up than gained, and there’s no guarantee that patient care will be protected,” Ryder said.

At the same time, Ryder acknowledged that the year of job security for workers affected by cutbacks is an unusually strong provision, and one that goes beyond the CNA’s own agreement with Kaiser.

Roughly 50,000 of the approximately 60,000 Kaiser employees covered by the new job-security pact work in California. In addition to nurses, the pact covers operating engineers, janitors and optometrists, among others. Unions involved in the pact include locals of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.

Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s biggest not-for-profit HMO. It serves 8.6 million consumers in 17 states and Washington, D.C.