The February 2026 “jobs report,” released the morning of Friday March 6, was flatly poor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which surveys employers and households about their hiring and layoffs and whether people are employed, found that the economy shed 92,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4 percent.
That’s not good, but there is an interesting asterisk: A strike against Kaiser Permanente hospitals in California and Hawaii sidelined 30,000 health-care workers, leading health care employment, which had been a bright spot in previous months, to decline by 28,000 jobs. Unless you are a Kaiser Permanente customer in California or Hawaii, you probably had no idea the strike was going on. Thank public policy under the Taft-Hartley Consensus, the 80-year Republican-led tradition of protecting the public from other people’s labor disputes.
Idle hands
Health care, the primary growth driver in payrolls, saw a loss of 28,000 due largely to a strike at Kaiser Permanente that sidelined more than 30,000 workers in Hawaii and California. Though the strike has since been resolved, it occurred during the BLS survey week so it subtracted from the jobs total.
Members of the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, a division of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) struck Kaiser Permanente starting the last week of January and continuing through February 26, when they returned to work after accepting a wage-increase offer the Associated Press reported a company spokesperson as saying was “based on an offer the company first made in October.”
Assuming that characterization is true (the AP reported that the union acceded to Kaiser’s 21.5% four-year wage-increase offer after demanding 25%), it’s a nice illustration that union “militancy” is not some magic bean that can get workers whatever the union promises. It’s entirely possible that workers forewent four weeks’ pay (or thereabouts, unions typically offer meager strike compensation, and some states allow strikers to collect unemployment insurance) for something they could have had without all the trouble.
Wait, why haven’t I heard about this?
So, if 30,000 workers went on strike—enough to make a strong point in the economy (as the population ages and Total Boomer Luxury Communism funnels more government funds into health care, the economy demands more health-care workers) look weak in official data—why didn’t I write about it beforehand? Why, unless you happen to be a Kaiser customer in California, had you probably never heard of the dispute until it happened?
The answer is the Taft-Hartley Consensus and its restrictions on industrial action. Following a major strike wave in 1945-1946, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act (after which I named the “consensus”), legislation that among other things limited who could strike for what and against whom.
Big Labor would like to be able to call legally protected strikes against anyone for any reason at any time. Union activists call this the “solidarity strike,” in which workers not involved in a labor dispute also strike to prevent consumers from avoiding the pain of a different strike. There is also the traditional “secondary boycott,” in which labor unions demand that their employers refuse to do business with a business involved in a union dispute. Unions also dream of the “general strike,” a universal work stoppage that would bring about socialist or communist revolution. (Really.)
But thanks to Republican lawmakers of old, unions are forbidden from doing this. The only strikes that are legally protected are primary strikes against the specific employer with which the union is bargaining. Thus, Kaiser’s staff were free to strike Kaiser, but no other unions could join in to increase the pain inflicted on the public.
There was still some pain, as evidenced by the national jobs report. (It’s too glib to just add 30,000 to the jobs total to “correct” for the strike; BLS derives the jobs number and unemployment rate from national surveys and applies statistical modeling, which is why there are always “revisions” to the numbers in subsequent months.) But by limiting the effects, the law protected the broader economy from fallout. The Taft-Hartley Consensus worked.
