As Kaiser Workers Strike, 'Not-for-Profit' Is Sitting on $67 Billion

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Kaiser has doubled down on hedge funds, outside staffing firms, and high executive compensation as workers lag behind.

by Matthew Cunningham-Cook October 18, 2025

Forty-five thousand workers at Kaiser Permanente—ranging from nurses to therapists to pharmacists—are on strike across the West Coast and Hawaii, in the country’s largest labor action of 2025, and the largest strike in the U.S. since the October 2024 longshore workers strike. The five-day limited-duration strike comes as workers continue to face major short staffing and wage increases that have lagged behind inflation in some of the country’s highest-cost-of-living areas.

Kaiser Permanente is an Oakland, California–headquartered integrated health care giant, with 300,000 employees, and a long track record of heavy union activity. While Kaiser is ostensibly a nonprofit, it in many ways acts like a for-profit—its physicians groups are for-profit entities, the Board of Directors is for the most part composed of people from the private sector, and the system’s executive compensation more resembles the private sector.

Kaiser CEO Greg Adams made nearly $13 million in 2023. Kaiser spent more than $72 million on total compensation for senior executives that year, with 12 executives besides Adams making over $2 million per year, and three besides Adams making over $4 million per year.

Kaiser’s care model has been celebrated for decades, and indeed, compared to UnitedHealth or the Hospital Corporation of America, Kaiser is a far better framework for health care delivery. Workers are striking not to upend the Kaiser model, they say, but to protect it against an encroaching for-profit orientation in health care and a national political environment that is utterly hostile to an ethos of patients before profits.

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-10-18-kaiser-workers-strike-not-for-profit-sitting-on-67-billion/