More than 1,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses will be receiving potentially "tens of millions of dollars” from the nonprofit giant in an arbitration agreement addressing inaccurate wage payments that began in 2021, the California Nurses Association announced earlier this week.
The agreement was confirmed by a representative of Kaiser Permanente who declined to comment on the total sum of the repayment. The system said the incorrect payments stemmed from a “clerical error,” which the union’s announcement described as a “mistake” and “disgusting Kaiser wage theft” from its nurses.
The dispute was addressed and settled through a process dictated by the parties’ collective bargaining agreement. The union, however, said the system had long dragged its feet and consulted its legal teams in an attempt to avoid the issue, adding that “because the union does not have direct access to Kaiser’s payroll system, it took years of nurses working together to piece together the true scale and extent of the problem, which Kaiser repeatedly tried to minimize and obscure.”
“They changed their payroll system, messed it up, and let the mistake steal millions of dollars from nurses,” Michelle Gutierrez Vo, a registered nurse at Kaiser Fremont Medical Center and the California Nurses Association’s president, said in a statement. “When we called them on it, their fancy lawyers fought us tooth and nail for every single dollar. Nurses wouldn’t take no for an answer, and we won back millions of dollars in stolen wages, and we went above and beyond Kaiser’s earlier attempts to settle for less.”
Kaiser, in a statement, noted that its payroll error resulted in both underpayments and overpayments, and that the organization has not sought to recover the latter. It said it is “committed to ensuring every [nurse] is paid accurately and in full accordance with their contract,” and will “promptly” be reaching out to the affected nurses.
“While we do not agree with the union's characterization of this matter, we respect the arbitrator's decision and will honor our obligations under it,” the system said.
Kaiser and the California Nurses Association, which represents over 25,000 registered nurses at 22 California facilities, both noted that the sides are in active negotiations over new collective bargaining agreements.