Registered nurses and nurse practitioners who work at 21 Kaiser Permanente hospitals and 65 clinics across Northern and Central California, the largest nurses’ collective bargaining contract in the U.S., have voted to approve a new three-year agreement that provides for substantial improvements in patient care, health and safety protections for nurses, and economic gains.

The pact was overwhelmingly approved in membership meetings held Tuesday through Friday last week from Santa Rosa to Fresno. The California Nurses Association/National Nurses United represents 18,000 Kaiser RNs and NPs, part of an overall membership of 185,000 RNs nationally in NNU, the largest U.S. organization of nurses.

“Kaiser RNs have long been in the forefront of standing up for their patients and themselves setting a benchmark that others have followed,” noted CNA/NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro. “The new pact could not have been realized without the unified determination of Kaiser nurses, to assuring the highest level of quality care for patients as well as protections for the nurses who deliver that care.”

“This contract will set the national standards for all other hospitals to achieve patient protections and solidify the future of the nursing profession,” said Zenei Cortez, RN, chair of the Kaiser RN bargaining team and a co-president of CNA.

“We look forward to a new chapter in our interactions with Kaiser,” DeMoro added. “We especially appreciate the commitment of Kaiser’s leadership to working to address our concerns, including working through the complicated problems associated with the changes in health care delivery, some of them related to the Affordable Care Act, and the attention it has paid in this contract to the health and safety of its registered nurses as well as patients.” 

“This contract continues the CNA tradition of providing an atmosphere where patients come first and nurses’ futures are protected,” said Kaiser Modesto RN Amy Glass.

“I’m proud to be part of an organization that has fought for and won patient and nurse protections,” said Cyndi Krahne, a Kaiser Santa Rosa RN.

Major components of the agreement include:

• The addition of 540 RN positions which RNs say should substantially improve the quality of care for hospitalized patients, as well as signaling a renewed commitment to RN training and employment opportunities for new RN graduates at a time many hospitals have frozen RN hires.

• Groundbreaking health and safety provisions, including a new accidental death and dismemberment benefit for RNs in recognition harmed by workplace violence and other workplace protections for RNs exposed to infectious diseases like Ebola and needle stick injuries. 

• Substantial economic gains for RNs and NPs, many of them the sole source of income for their families or extended families. Over the three years of the agreement, all the nurses will receive 14 percent pay increases through across the board hikes and lump sum payments, including a 5 percent increase retroactive to January 1, 2015.

• Additional long-term retirement security for Kaiser RNs and NPs through maintenance of a secure defined benefit pension plan plus a significant increase in employer contributions to the nurses’ 401k pension plans for the 87 percent of Kaiser RNs with those plans.

• A new committee of direct care RNs and NPs who will work with management to address the concerns RNs have about care standards in Kaiser facilities, plus expansion of the existing quality liaison program of RNs and NPs who work on patient care issues.

• Annual paid release time, the first in the nation, for 25 RNs every year to participate in NNU’s disaster relief program, the Registered Nurse Response Network, which has dispatched hundreds of RNs to provide basic medical services following U.S. and global disasters from Hurricane Katrina to the Haiti earthquake to Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. 

CNA said it also committed to helping National Union of Healthcare Worker Kaiser workers, including mental health clinicians, achieve a contract agreement as well.