Kaiser Permanente has opened a new 352-bed hospital in Downey, which will provide high-quality, personal, and affordable healthcare in Southeast Los Angeles County for many years into the future. The $390 million Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center is located near the northwest corner of the intersection of Imperial Highway and Bellflower Boulevard, situated close to Kaiser Permanente's outpatient Garden and Orchard Medical Office Buildings. The full-service hospital will largely replace Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower Medical Center, located approximately one-mile to the south, which opened 44 years ago in 1965.

Hundreds of SEIU-UHW health care workers will rally in front of Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Regional Office at 11:30 a.m. on August 20, 2009, before delivering a 10-day notice of informational pickets at hospitals and clinics across California to protest Kaiser's layoff plan. Simultaneously, SEIU-UHW workers in Pasadena will deliver the 10-day notice to Kaiser's Southern California Regional Office. Kaiser workers across the state voted resoundingly to hold the informational picket. Despite announcing earlier in August their excellent financial performance for the second quarter--a net income of $620 million and nearly twice last year's second quarter--Kaiser Permanente management has been insistent on its plan to send out notices to individual employees. While Kaiser wants to reduce some positions as part of overall efforts to reduce costs, SEIU-UHW believes this could be accomplished by offering certain employees generous, voluntary severance packages the union has negotiated.

Kaiser Permanente is laying off 650 workers at facilities throughout Southern California. The cuts, which include temporary, on-call and short-hour positions, are part of 1,800 layoffs statewide. In Southern California, it equates to 1% of the nonphysician jobs.