Kaiser Contract Talks to Resume After One-Day Strike : Walkout: 12,000 service employees, including about 1,100 workers in Orange County, protest what union leaders called unfair labor practices by the HMO.

Nearly 12,000 Kaiser Permanente service employees staged a one-day strike Thursday, forcing Southern California’s largest health maintenance organization to reschedule patient appointments and deploy top-level administrators as clerks, housekeepers and dishwashers.

Meanwhile, a federal mediator called the two sides back to the bargaining table, and a Kaiser spokeswoman said contract negotiations are to resume this morning between the giant HMO and Local 399 of the Service Employees International Union, whose members are expected to return to work today.

Thursday’s strike affected 70 Kaiser facilities, including eight hospitals, in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. While urgent care was not interrupted, some patients were forced to wait a little longer than usual for service.

More than 100 Kaiser employees picketed in front of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Anaheim to decry purported unfair labor practices, and others protested outside Kaiser clinics scattered throughout Orange County.

In total, about 1,100 Kaiser workers countywide refused to report to their jobs. However, Kaiser had prepared for the protest by shifting personnel so that services would not be interrupted to its 188,000 Orange County members.

Despite the labor action, only one of the 16 Kaiser medical clinics in Orange County was closed for the day. Patients at the West Anaheim Park clinic and laboratory on West Orange Avenue were referred to another clinic nearby.

Although patients were not being scheduled for same-day appointments at the local clinics Thursday, they were seen on a first-come, first-served basis.

“Everything is going like clockwork,” said Kaiser spokeswoman Donna Donan-Drasner.

Dean Jordan, a 49-year-old patient who was leaving Kaiser’s Anaheim hospital in a wheelchair after foot surgery, agreed that the protest wasn’t significantly hurting service. “I didn’t see any real effect from the strike. Service was perfect,” he said.

Motorists passing by picketers at the hospital on Lakeview Avenue in many instances honked their horns and gave thumbs-up signs of support for the workers. And picketers said a couple of sympathetic Kaiser physicians had brought fruit and muffins for their breakfast.

“It is not a wage issue; it is a rights issue,” said Dee Dee Remijio of Fullerton, a pathology assistant and 10-year Kaiser employee who was pushing her 9-month-old daughter in a stroller on the picket line.

The picketers, who said they were mainly concerned about a potential loss of their job benefits and grievance rights, did not believe that a one-day strike would jeopardize patient care.

“When we get back tomorrow, the paperwork will be a mess, but the patients will be taken care of,” said Bev Bosco, a licensed vocational nurse on the picket line.

Inside the Anaheim hospital, a management team--strengthened with personnel from Kaiser’s regional headquarters in Pasadena and Kaiser hospitals in Fontana, San Diego and Riverside--performed strikers’ jobs. Physicians scheduled to be on education leave were also called in to help.

“Doing the staffing is the hardest part,” said hospital administrator Gerald McCall. The walls of his “command center,” as he called it, on the hospital’s eighth floor were papered with staffing charts.

McCall said doctors were continuing to admit new patients to the hospital, where 129 of 165 available beds were full Thursday.

In the cafeteria, hospital staff members were getting free catered lunches so that managers who had become food service workers for a day could concentrate on feeding patients.

Among those delivering lunch trays to patients was Renee Webster, who usually works in personnel. Leaning against an elevator wall and out of breath, she said, “I guess I have been in a desk job too many years.”

Elsewhere, patients in some Los Angeles clinics were exasperated by delays in service.

‘I hope they didn’t forget about us,” grumbled Virginia Cretal, 31, of Moorpark, growing impatient as she and her 3-year-old daughter waited for 30 minutes past their scheduled appointment at the Kaiser Thousand Oaks Clinic. However, she and the child, who suffered from a cold, saw a doctor five minutes later.

At the chain’s flagship hospital on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the chief engineer was folding and stacking linens and a quality consultant was cleaning rooms. Executives, dressed in jeans and sneakers, were good-naturedly wheeling patients through the corridors while management analysts washed dishes in the kitchen.

Yet they were harried beneath their good humor. “I miss my employees,” lamented a weary Jeff Grosvenor, the manager of the orthopedics department, who on Thursday doubled as an appointment clerk. At 10 a.m., he surveyed his empty office, took a quick sip of a Diet Pepsi and sighed: “This is my breakfast.”

Outside, several hundred picketers marched under overcast skies, chanting “What do we want? Contract! When do we want it? Now!” At noon, a caravan of three white minivans pulled up, horns blasting. Nearly two dozen members of the union’s negotiating team piled out of the vans; they were greeted by wild cheers from the striking workers as a handful of doctors, clad in hospital scrubs, looked on with bemusement from an overhead walkway.

The strike began just past midnight Wednesday, hours after the rank and file voted overwhelmingly--5,432 to 1,228--to reject a proposed three-year contract.

Although doctors and registered nurses were not involved, the union does represent other health care professionals, including vocational nurses and operating room and surgical technicians who walked off the job along with X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists and other support staff.

Union leaders billed the walkout as a protest against unfair labor practices by Kaiser and said it is part of a long-range, aggressive strategy that may eventually include a general strike. Should that happen, it would be the second such strike in three years by Local 399.

Times staff writers Jim Herron Zamora and Sara Catania contributed to this story.