Barring progress at the bargaining table, some 32,000 workers at health care giant Kaiser Permanente are set to walk off the job on Monday, November 15. The workers comprise the Alliance of Health Care Unions, which consists of twenty-one union locals and spans from California to Hawaii to Georgia. Should they strike, they’ll join another Kaiser work stoppage by more than 750 engineers, which began on September 18. The Service Employees International Union — United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) says that its members will engage in a one-day sympathy strike with those engineers on November 18, while California Nurses Association members and two thousand of Kaiser’s mental health workers will do the same on November 19.

There are rumors of impending tentative agreements for some of the locals within the Alliance, but neither Kaiser nor the unions have announced any such deals. As to the issues on which the company has dug in its heels, there are several. For one, workers want raises, and the company is offering a mere 1 percent annual raise for the duration of the three-year contract. There are also wage disparities to rectify: Some workers at Kaiser locations in the Inland Empire make 39 percent less than their counterparts in the same positions at Kaiser locations in Los Angeles and Orange County. Further, Kaiser is pushing for a new wage tier that would drastically reduce pay for those hired starting in January of 2023: The company’s proposal cuts their pay by anywhere from 26 to 39 percent.

Finally, there is the issue of staffing. Safe staffing levels have long been a central demand among health care workers, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the issue. When health care facilities don’t have enough workers, they turn to “travelers,” registry workers who travel from one facility to another on short-term contracts. It’s a vicious cycle: Health care workers leave their facilities to become travelers because pay for such work has skyrocketed, while pay for traditional health care jobs stagnates. The problem is so bad at Kaiser that some workers began placing gravestones in an employee locker room, with one for each coworker who had left.