Striking engineers say Kaiser’s well-crafted messages belie truth about wages, contract talks

Sacramento-area stationary engineers lashed out at Kaiser Permanente on Friday as they settled into their 63rd day of a strike that they said could have been prevented if company negotiators hadn’t low-balled them on wages and dismissed their proposals.

They talked to The Sacramento Bee while surrounded by hundreds of nurses and mental health clinicians who had come out at Kaiser’s Sacramento-area medical centers to support them in their strike and raise public awareness about their plight. It was the last of two days of sympathy strikes called by unions representing more than 60,000 Kaiser employees.

Kaiser has “a big PR department. These are people who have gone to school and learned how to craft messages,” said Walter Thiel, a Kaiser Sacramento stationary engineer and an Fair Oaks father of two, “and we’re not equipped like that, you know, we’re just guys trying to feed a family and pay a mortgage.”

For instance, Thiel said, Kaiser has said he and his co-workers are among the highest-paid engineers in the nation, but the same union that represents Kaiser’s stationary engineers — International Union of Operating Engineers, Stationary Engineers Local 39 — also negotiates on behalf of engineers working for Chinese Hospital, for Sutter Health, and for employers in the Building Owners and Managers Association of San Francisco.

They know what their members are paid at each company, Thiel said, and Kaiser’s engineers will actually be among the lowest-paid engineers in San Francisco if Local 39 accepts the company’s offer. Each year of their three-year contract, he said, the Kaiser engineers’ wages would drop further below their peers elsewhere.

Kaiser, in its statements to media, has said that the company provides excellent wages and benefits, paying its engineers an average of more than $180,000 in total wages and benefits. The company also said it reached its proposal through constructive and reasonable bargaining.

Thiel said that about a third of the company’s $180,000 wages and benefit quote includes health care that the company provides to its employees. He and his wife, he added, are scrabbling to pay their mortgage and help their two children get through college. Meanwhile, he said, the company has offered a wage increase that won’t keep up with inflation this year.

“I’m driving a 20-year-old truck,” he said. “I had that truck before I started at Kaiser.”

Kaiser executives have said in earlier statements that wages and benefits account for half of the company’s operational costs and that Local 39 has demanded greater wage gains than other unions have received.

“The union insists it receive much more – in some cases nearly 2 times more – than other union agreements covering Kaiser Permanente employees,” said Michelle Gaskill-Hames, the senior vice president for hospital and health plan operations for Kaiser in Northern California

Health economics expert Paul Ginsburg of the University of Southern California said that, if labor represents half of a company’s costs, then a wage increase of, say, 4% would raise costs by 2%. Health providers likely would recoup that 2% as part of an annual premium hike, he said.

Stationary engineer Mark Alman said he and his co-workers have been maintaining their picket line 24 hours, adding that they will fight as long as need be.

“All we ask for is a true, true attempt at fair negotiations. ... It’s about sharing the profits and being a family,” Alman said. “You want to talk about being a family. Then let’s treat each other like a family. I don’t give my kids a different meal than we make. We share the same meal. We all get equal portions, and we leave the table full.”

While Thiel and Alman said they are unhappy with how the company has portrayed the engineers’ compensation, they said it has been even more frustrating dealing with company negotiators in bargaining.

They refused to meet in person, Thiel said, something that would make the bargaining process easier. He and other union stewards instead have driven to their IUOE hall in San Francisco and fired up computers for Zoom meetings, only to have sessions that lasted just 25 or 30 minutes with little progress.

“On the last round, they had us sitting, waiting for three hours for them to come back with something else, only to be told, ‘Oh, no, we’re not gonna have anything tonight,’” he said. “This is the way it’s been. Before this last couple of days, they hadn’t brought us a proposal since Oct. 15. That was the last time we gave them a counter.”

Thiel said that, after company representatives told the engineers they were being paid over scale, the union asked them to provide information on where they got those numbers, but that information was never forthcoming.

It’s also frustrating, he said, because the people on the company’s negotiating team often must leave to consult leadership about requests. Thiel said that wasn’t something that happened when Bernard Tyson was chairman and chief executive, and he feels that a change in leadership at the top has brought about a change in the company’s relationship with labor.

“They say, ‘Oh, Kaiser has a rich history of working with labor unions, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you have a history of it. It’s certainly not happening anymore. That’s all history.”

As part of good-faith bargaining, Kaiser should be complying with the union’s requests for information and ensuring that someone is available to make key decisions on proposals, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

There are a number of aspects of good-faith bargaining, Bronfenbrenner said, but these behaviors will stand out to workers like Thiel who have experience in negotiations.

Kaiser officials said Friday that they have been bargaining in good faith with Local 39 for several months and remained optimistic they can resolve the remaining issues.