Striking health care workers wave signs outside Kaiser Permanente’s Roseville Medical Center on Jan. 26 in Roseville as part of a monthlong labor walkout. The union later Monday that workers would return Tuesday after reporting “significant movement” in contract talks with Kaiser.
HANNAH RUHOFF
hruhoff@sacbee.com
A large group of Kaiser Permanente workers will return to work Tuesday morning following a monthlong strike, citing new progress in bargaining.
Workers went on strike Jan. 26, calling on the health system to increase staffing levels and raise wages. The group included certified registered nurse anesthetists, physician assistants and certified nurse midwives, including many at Kaiser’s Sacramento-area facilities.
The union — the United Nurses Associations of California-Union of Health Care Professionals — said in a statement Monday that it had seen “significant movement” at the bargaining table over the past two days.
The union publicly said it was pushing for a 25%, across-the-board wage increase. Kaiser proposed 21.5%.
Kaiser said in a statement Monday afternoon that union leadership had accepted the 21.5% across-the-board wage increase. The health system confirmed that striking employees were expected to return to work in the coming days.
“We are continuing to make progress and remain optimistic about reaching contract agreements soon,” the statement said.
Peter Sidhu, executive vice president for UNAC-UHCP, said the union has made progress with its members’ local agreements, which cover wages and day-to-day working conditions for specific groups of workers.
There has been less movement, Sidhu said, on the national agreement, which covers retirement and health benefits. Moreover, he said, the health system has proposed folding language from the national contracts into the local agreements. The union needs more certainty about how that would affect the contracts’ terms, and how that language would be interpreted in the future.
“With our national agreement, that may take more time,” Sidhu said. “We felt that it was in our best interest to return our members to the bedside to take care of patients.”
The strike was a marked escalation in a series of protests and walkouts over the past year. UNAC-UHCP held an informational rally at Kaiser’s Roseville hospital in March, staged a one-day walkout in September, and a five-day strike in October. The union said that in December it filed an unfair labor practice charge alleging Kaiser stalled negotiations.
The latest strike was open-ended and lasted four weeks. Workers did not receive strike pay, Sidhu said, which some unions provide to members during walkouts.
“We have a diehard group of health care workers who are willing to fight for patient care and for the things that they do honestly believe they deserve. But in this instance, it just did not make sense to keep them out longer,” Sidhu said.
The union represents 2,800 workers in Northern California and about 30,000 Kaiser workers in California and Hawaii combined.
The Oakland-based health system has been in contract talks since May with the Alliance of Health Care Unions — a federation of 23 unions of Kaiser workers, of which UNAC/UHCP is a member — and negotiating for individual contracts with the local bargaining groups.
Kaiser has defended its contract offers, which would raise annual payroll for Alliance-represented employees by $2 billion, the health system said in January. The union’s proposal, the health system has said, would raise it by $3 billion.
Workers were not set to picket Monday, the union said, as the guild negotiated return-to-work agreements with Kaiser.
The union said in the release that it had notified Kaiser that the strike would end at 7 a.m.
This story was originally published February 23, 2026 at 12:39 PM.
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Annika Merrilees is a business reporter for The Sacramento Bee. She previously spent five years covering business and health care for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.