On March 18, approximately 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health therapists, social workers, and psychologists went on strike across California including right here in Santa Clara County, and we were proud to stand with them on the picket line.
The strike wasn’t just about pay. It was about Kaiser’s decision to overhaul its patient triage system, replacing trained therapists with yes-or-no prompts and AI-assisted routing, without input from a care provider, without transparency, and without accountability when things go wrong.
Kaiser is under both state and federal monitoring for mental health parity violations, having paid out over $230 million in penalties for failing to provide adequate mental healthcare to its 4.6 million patients. Despite that, the company has refused to include protections against AI replacing therapists in its Northern California contract, even while its Southern California agreement includes that exact language. When union bargaining committee members asked directly whether the change foreshadowed layoffs, Kaiser said it wanted “flexibility.”
This isn’t just a Kaiser story. It’s the same playbook we’re seeing across industries: deploy the technology fast, skip worker input, call it innovation, and when workers push back, call them the problem. The workers who get hit first are always the same, lower-wage, majority women, majority workers of color.
WPUSA Executive Director Maria Noel Fernandez joined healthcare workers, California Nurses Association, Working Families Party, and representatives from Assemblymember Ash Kalra and Senator Dave Cortese’s offices on the picket line. Her message was simple: when one of us is on the line, all of us show up.
The fight for worker voice in how technology gets deployed, in hospitals, in warehouses, in government offices, is the same fight, and we’re building the coalition to win it.
