Yahoo TV

STORY: About 75,000 workers at U.S. healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente started a three-day strike Wednesday (October 4).

It’s the largest-ever strike in American health care.

Those walking off the job include nurses, medical technicians and other support staff at hundreds of hospitals across California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Virginia and Washington D.C.

A coalition of unions says the firm has failed to address staffing shortages, leaving medics overworked and underpaid.

Nurse Juan Retana was on the picket line outside one Los Angeles hospital:

"Yeah, we're out here because we want the world to know that Kaiser is being unfair to us. They're not treating us right. We were working through the pandemic, we were working through hard times. We're understaffed, underpaid. They're not giving us what we need to take care of our patients properly.”

Kaiser says hospitals and emergency departments will remain open.

They’ll be staffed by doctors, managers and “contingency workers”.

But the action is another sign of wider, growing labor unrest in the United States.

Unions have become bolder about asking for better pay and benefits as inflation soars.

Cardiology lab worker Armando Velasco says it’s a reasonable request:

"It's ridiculous that we're asking for six percent and Kaiser doesn't want to give it. It's not even fair. We're not asking to be part of the millionaire club, we're just asking to be part of society and be able to afford gas without having to go two jobs. That's all we're asking. That's fair.”

The company and unions both said that talks were ongoing, with negotiators working through the night.