More than 75,000 nurses, nursing assistants, technicians, pharmacists and other healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente went on strike this week in California and beyond. Their unions say it is the largest health care strike in recent American history.

It is indeed unusual for American medical workers to go on strike. After all, lives are in their hands, which increases the stakes of every strike. But health care strikes are more common in other countries, and there are reasons to believe Kaiser is on the cusp of more labor unrest among health care providers in this country.

Kaiser employees argue that the low wages and benefits, lack of adequate training and poor working conditions that prompted them to strike also put patients at risk. Health worker unions have said strikes like this week could help improve patient care by tackling persistent staff shortages. They say the better benefits and salaries they are advocating will encourage other workers to fill open positions and stay in their jobs longer. According to data obtained by the unions, 11% of union positions at Kaiser remained unfilled in April.

My colleagues at Rand Corp. and I took a close look at entry-level health care professionals a few years ago as part of a study for the Department of Health and Human Services. We found that this class of workers faces many challenges, including high turnover, poor working conditions, low wages and benefits, and few opportunities for advancement or training.

Due to the nature of these employees’ roles in healthcare organizations, they often have little power to implement change. Strikes may be the only leverage they have, and non-union workers don’t even have that.

Medical strikes are much more common in other countries. For example, doctors and other health workers in Britain took part in the latest in a series of strikes this week, and Israeli doctors went on strike in July over their government’s anti-democratic turn. Two American doctors recently argued in a commentary for the health care news site Stat that doctors here should be more willing to adopt the tools of organized labor to become better advocates for their patients and for public health in general. They further noted that state interference in medical issues such as vaccination, masking, and reproductive and gender-affirming care requires American doctors who know what good care should look like to stand up for it.

Doctors who treat high-risk pregnancies are leaving states that have taken restrictive stances on abortion care in search of places where they can effectively help their patients. And if we have learned anything during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that expertise, especially in science and medicine, has lost trust and stature, increasing the pressure on the healthcare system. Scientists and doctors are increasingly marginalized and their opinions are less respected than those of social media influencers.

Yes, people are closed to frontline healthcare workers during the pandemic. But these same workers were often not given the protective equipment they needed and were significantly more likely to become infected in the early days of the virus’ spread, causing as many as 180,000 deaths among healthcare workers worldwide in the first year and a half of the pandemic. more than 3,600 in the United States.

Nevertheless, it is a relatively new phenomenon for the American medical workforce to demand better working conditions for themselves, along with better care for their patients. Kaiser’s nurses, technicians and pharmacists are outliers for now. But they can lead the way for the people who make up the rest of America’s vast health care industry to stand up for their needs and values.

Shira Fischer is a physician policy researcher at the Rand Corp.