Kaiser Permanente is moving forward with a plan to lay off 60 gardeners in Northern California and replace them with an outside company.
Kaiser made the decision last week to make the layoffs affecting workers in 16 cities including here in Santa Rosa. A total of three workers will lose their job at Kaiser in Santa Rosa, including Stephanie Miller who’s worked there for 24 years.
The union, SEIU-UHW, contends that Kaiser didn’t need to make these cuts citing the company has made 6.3 billion dollars in profits over the past two years. The gardeners could lose their jobs as soon as May 11th.
Kaiser Permanente VP of Communications John Nelson responded in a statement saying:
“Kaiser Permanente already uses an outside landscaping firm at six of our Northern California medical centers to provide a comprehensive campus management program, using a combination of irrigation technology and experts who can provide advice on design and landscaping maintenance. After thorough review, we decided to expand the use of this outside service to the remainder of our campuses.
We will be working with our affected internal landscaping staff to provide training and support their transition to other jobs within Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser Permanente has a proven track record of re-deploying the majority of our employees impacted by job changes to other positions within our organization. Not only do we offer retraining and reassignment, but if for some reason redeployment isn’t feasible, we provide our staff with up to one year of full pay and benefits.
We never make decisions lightly when they affect our employees’ jobs. We don’t know of any other employer who offers more generous support to employees who are affected by job changes.
We are proud of our efforts to create union jobs and in fact have added more than 8,000 SEIU-UHW represented employees since 2015. As one of the largest private employers in California with more than 149,000 employees and 16,000 physicians, we have added more than 13,000 jobs in the state since 2015. We have more than 12,000 open staff positions and will continue to add many kinds of jobs, including blue collar jobs.”