California’s lowest-paid health care workers rally in Sacramento. Here’s why

California’s lowest-paid health care workers are expressing outrage over wages that they say don’t allow them to cover their basic needs, rallying in cities around the state to demand sizable increases in their minimum wages.

On Tuesday in Sacramento, home care providers chastised the Sacramento County board of supervisors for approving a 36% raise for themselves while doing nothing to ensure that those who care for region’s elderly and disabled have a livable wage. Represented by SEIU Local 2015, they want a minimum wage of $20 without compromising health care benefits.

That same day, SEIU-UHW kicked off three days of protests where workers will picket at different Kaiser Permanente medical centers in Manteca, Roseville, Sacramento, south Sacramento, Stockton, Vacaville and Vallejo. This union has pushed for a $25 minimum wage for health care workers in municipalities around California, including in Sacramento, and now is backing statewide legislation for it.

And last week, AFSCME Local 3299 protested outside a meeting of the University of California regents to demand that they institute a $25 minimum wage, along with a 5% wage increase to unrepresented students, frontline service workers and patient care staff. The UC has given double-digit raises to top-level senior managers, janitor Davina Woods told The Bee, while she and other workers must rely on pooling money with their family to pay for their housing and other needs.

What led to health care worker protests?

Robert Bruno, director of the labor studies program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said that workers across multiple industrial sectors — autoworkers, UPS drivers, health care workers and more — are demanding more equitable wage increases.

“For 40-50 years, wages have been largely stagnant in most of the labor force, and ... while there was dislike about that, there wasn’t a whole lot of expressed resentment or organizing (around it),” Bruno said. “Post-COVID, with the large degree of income inequality that is now near record highs. I think workers are feeling like they have little bit more power in the workplace, and therefore, they’re feeling more comfortable about expressing their outrage.”

Many workers transitioned jobs during the COVID pandemic, and they got not only hefty pay increases but also employers who respected them for their service, Bruno said, and their peers have taken note. Labor is now telling management that the modest wage increases of the last four or five decades are no longer acceptable, he said.

Sheree Utterback joined a sea of protesters in purple SEIU Local 2015 shirts in Sacramento on Tuesday, telling the Sacramento County supervisors just that: In-home caregivers want $20 an hour, and they don’t want to see their health care benefits suffer to make up for it.

Now 30 years old, she’s been taking care of her grandmother since she was 15, only taking a short stint off for college. She was quickly drawn back, though, after her grandmother had a heart attack, and she ended up giving up her job delivering newspapers to take care of her grandmother’s medical needs. “I do it out of love.”

But it takes more than just time or love to make sure that Utterback can give the care her grandmother deserves. It involves a long list of tasks for which she says she is often underpaid. She takes her grandmother to the bathroom, cooks for her, handles her doctor appointments, shops with her at the grocery store and ensures she’s safe while driving her around. That takes money for supplies, gas and food, not just for her grandmother but for herself as well.

A former Lincoln resident, Utterback drove around two hours from Red Bluff to share her story with the supervisors. Now, she makes Tehama’s County’s rate of $15.5 an hour, $1.00 an hour less than Sacramento County’s wage of $16.50 an hour. She often worries about how she’s going to pay for next month’s rent or afford another round of groceries.

“I’m tired of getting underpaid.” Utterback said. “How are we supposed to feel safe in this economy?… I’m afraid I’m gonna be homeless.”

How will Sacramento supervisors respond?

There are around 35,000 workers like Utterback in Sacramento County, and the supervisors appeared to empathize with their struggles. The union has been in contract negotiations with county representatives since late last year, and District 5 Supervisor Pat Hume told union members and his fellow lawmakers at Tuesday’s meeting that he’d like to see the caregivers’ concerns addressed. “This has gone on a very long time, and it doesn’t seem to be coming to a fruition.”

Though other supervisors elected to keep their thoughts private for internal deliberations, Hume indicated that he’d be open to seeing cuts to other parts of the budget in order to accommodate the unions’ request. Chair Rich Desmond told the public he’d like to see a solution “sooner rather than later.”

In an email, Kim Nava, a spokesperson for the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, said the board is not an active participant in negotiations, but is routinely updated and kept in the loop. SEIU’s proposal would cost the County $40 million extra annually, while the supervisors’ 36% raise cost an additional $231,000 annually, she said. She maintained that the county’s proposals would not require a reduction in health care benefits in order to see wage increases.

“The County is proposing a $1 increase to the hourly wage,” she wrote. “In addition to the $1 increase, the County is proposing the 80 cents per hour it currently pays into a medical trust instead be paid as a provider wage to each provider.”

The rally at the board of supervisors echoes previous union negotiations in San Francisco, whose supervisors voted in May to elect for a pathway to a $25 per hour minimum wage as new contracts take effect in the fall. Alameda County also worked with the union to meet their demands, said Kim Evon, executive vice president of SEIU Local 2015. Now, she says it is all the more crucial for Sacramento to follow suit.

At Tuesday’s rally outside Kaiser Permanente’s Sacramento Medical Center, patient care technician Jvonne Christian said Kaiser used to lead the way on pay but that now its wages have dropped so low that it’s competing with retailers and restaurateurs for employees.

“They can afford to bring us to a livable wage because we have some of our co-workers sleeping in their cars. We have some of our co-workers who are homeless right now,” Christian said, “And being a health care worker and working for Kaiser and being homeless, that’s disheartening.”

De Borah Anderson, a unit assistant at the Sacramento Medical Center on Morse Avenue, does what’s necessary to keep a hospital department up and running — answering phones, picking up blood supplies, ensuring medical tests get done and more. She said she often must cover two units on her shift because there just aren’t enough staff to go around.

“I cannot get all the tests done and get them done in a reasonable time,” Anderson said. “Then we have the doctors who are complaining, but there’s nothing we can do if we’re short-staffed. When we have like 15 patients, all of a sudden, they say that we don’t need a unit assistant, but we do because things don’t get done. Then they want to put a volunteer in that spot, or they want to take a nurse who may be on light duty and put them in that spot. That’s not acceptable. That’s our job and they need to hire more people.”

Anderson and Christian, both members of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, said they have had to cover more patients and add on work assignments that are typically done by other types of staff. Christian said she’s doing “quadruple the work” because she’s transporting more patients and picking up work that a certified nursing assistant would normally be assigned to do.

The SEIU-UHW members say the situation isn’t safe for patients or employees. The union, part of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, is negotiating a new contract with Kaiser. The current contract will expire in September.

Kaiser Permanente issued a statement about the protests, saying in part: “The staffing challenges mentioned by the Coalition have been happening all across health care but are actually less true at Kaiser Permanente now than elsewhere. ...The average employee turnover rate across health care is 21.4%. ... While it crept up a bit during the height of the pandemic, we are thankful that our current rate of 8.5% as of June 2023 is significantly lower than the rest of health care.”