The Colorado union representing Kaiser Permanente health workers filed a federal lawsuit against the company Thursday, alleging the organization chronically understaffed its services and ignored concerns raised by workers.

The lawsuit was filed by the local chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents Kaiser employees. The suit alleges that Kaiser violated collective bargaining agreements between the union and company, which require “sufficient staffing” to provide quality care to patients. The two parties are currently negotiating new contracts, a sometimes contentious process of hammering out working conditions between company and workers; the current contracts expire in spring 2022, a union official said earlier this week.

“Kaiser Permanente health care workers are standing up for their patients and making sure that their very ill patients get the healthcare they pay for and need,” Nate Bernstein, the union’s health care director, said in a statement Friday. “The lawsuit UFCW Local 7 has filed is intended to make sure Kaiser lives up to its commitment to the community, but also the health care workers that are so devoted and critical to our community. UFCW Local 7 health care members are making modest and common sense requests to perform their jobs safely.”

In its own statement, Kaiser called the suit an unfortunate “attempt to create a media event to get leverage during the ongoing bargaining process.” 

“Staffing is always a key priority for us,” the company wrote. “In Colorado, we’ve filled almost 1,200 positions this year alone — the majority of those positions in care delivery roles. We also currently have nearly 400 open positions in care delivery and are working to fill them as quickly as possible.”

The suit comes just days after more than 24,000 Kaiser nurses and other health care workers in Oregon and California voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against the company, threatening to walk out over pay and working conditions. In contract negotiations there, Kaiser has pushed for a two-tiered salary system, which would pay new employees less than current ones. 

In a statement to the Associated Press earlier this week, the company wrote that it asked “our employees reject a call to walk away from the patients who need them. Our priority is to continue to provide our members with high-quality, safe care.”

Bernstein told the Gazette earlier this week that such a strike isn’t imminent in Colorado, as negotiations are ongoing and the current contract has a no-strike clause within it. But at a rally outside of the Capitol on Thursday night, union members excoriated the two-tier proposal, and local union president Kim Cordova said it would place a target on the backs of veteran, higher-paid employees.

The company told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week that its union employees were paid at least 26% over market in nearly location that the company operates. 

At the heart of the Colorado lawsuit is what the union describes as chronic understaffing of a Kaiser messaging service and an infusion center. In 2019, the suit says, Kaiser launched a unified messaging center to collect and respond to communications from patients. The service is run by nurses and other health providers, and the union accused the company of staffing it below its own guidelines.

The suit alleges that the center had significant backlogs of messages to respond to, requiring staffers to work emergency shifts on weekends, and that it delayed care for patients in physical and mental health crises. The suit alleges that one patient died by suicide after their spouse sent a message seeking care.

The understaffing violated the contract between Kaiser and the union, the suit alleges, which lays out a progressive process for monitoring and addressing workforce concerns. 

In its statement, the company wrote that it was “bargaining in good faith” with the national union alliance that includes the Colorado local that filed the lawsuit, and that Kaiser believes “disagreements are best resolved at the bargaining table, as we’ve done with our labor unions for decades.”

Though Colorado’s Kaiser workforce does not appear to be on the brink of the strike like their peers on the West Coast, dozens of union workers and their supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Thursday night to protest the company’s staffing levels and, members allege, its putting “profits over patients.” One man held a sign declaring that workers would “strike for what is right”; another invited Kaiser executives to swap jobs with her for a month. 

Becky Sassaman, a Kaiser nurse who spoke at the rally, blasted the company’s staffing and treatment of providers.

“There is a human limit to what you can do,” she said. “This organization has pushed us, all of us … and nurses and health care workers are breaking. They are breaking emotionally.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.