August 18, 2023

LOS ANGELES – The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions (CKPU), representing 85,000 healthcare workers, announced it has relocated multiple days of negotiation meetings at the InterContinental Downtown, in solidarity with striking Los Angeles hotel workers. The coalition of healthcare workers moved its business instead to the Westin Bonaventure which is not in a labor dispute or under strike threat.

As Los Angeles continues to make national headlines for the “Hot Labor Summer” strike wave of hotel workers, actors, and screenwriters, healthcare workers are joining the fray, as the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions held nearly 50 pickets across California last month and stands with striking hotel workers.

Workers in both the hotel and healthcare industries are facing critical staffing shortages because they cannot afford to live in the expensive areas where they work on the low wages they receive.  For hospitals, the staffing shortage has resulted in a crisis in patient care.

“Working people can’t afford to live in Los Angeles, yet employers like Kaiser Permanente and the hospitality industry are raking in record profits,” said Jacquelyn E Duley, a radiology technologist at Kaiser Permanente and member of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West. “Hospitals and hotels are facing critical shortages because workers can’t afford to live here on the low wages they pay.”

Duley continued: “We are inspired by the courage and fearlessness of the thousands of UNITE HERE Local 11 strikers standing up across Southern California to demand better for themselves and their families, and we will continue to stand by them until they have the justice they deserve. This summer Los Angeles has proven that whether we are actors, writers, hospital workers, or hotel workers, our fight is the same.”

“We applaud our 85,000 brothers and sisters in the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions who are standing with us now, both in their refusal to give business to a hotel under strike as well as in their fight for healthcare justice,” said Rinha Gonzalez, a room attendant at the Intercontinental and member of Local 11. “We are striving for the better future we know is possible and that every working person deserves, and that future cannot be fully realized until we have a just healthcare system where every single one of us has access to affordable, high quality care.”

Thousands of healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente took to the streets last month, holding nearly 50 pickets across California and other states, against an employer that wracked up more than $21 billion in profits in just the past five years. Thousands of UNITE HERE Local 11 hotel workers have been on a historic rolling strike across Southern California for weeks, as contracts for 100 unionized hotels throughout Los Angeles and Orange County expire.