A major work stoppage that has agitated the nation’s largest not-for-profit medical provider for nearly a month is set to end following productive negotiations, labor leaders said Monday.

The healthcare union representing the 31,000 workers involved in the strike said there had been “significant movement” at the bargaining table over the weekend, and as a result, union leaders decided to notify Kaiser that workers would return to hospitals and healthcare facilities at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

“[R]eturning members to their patients and their livelihoods is the clearest path to securing a final agreement and building on the progress achieved during the strike,” the United Nurses Assns. of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, or UNAC/UHCP, said in a statement Monday.

Kaiser spokesperson Terry Kanakri said the union had accepted a pay proposal the company made in the fall, and called the movement in negotiations “good progress.”

“We are working with our teams to schedule returning employees over the coming days in an orderly way that protects patient safety and minimizes any disruption,” Kanakri wrote in an email.

Tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers, including registered nurses, nurse anesthetists, pharmacists, midwives, physician assistants, rehab therapists, speech language pathologists, dietitians and other specialty healthcare professionals, walked off the job Jan. 26 in an open-ended strike.

The union launched the strike amid stalled contract negotiations, and over allegations it filed in a federal unfair labor practice charge that Kaiser had unlawfully undermined negotiations and attempted to intimidate workers by warning them about the consequences of striking and directing their peers to report union activity to management.

UNAC/UHCP said the healthcare system had neglected discussions over employee burnout and patient safety and unilaterally halted bargaining in mid-December. Kaiser ended talks both with a national coalition of unions representing Kaiser workers — called the Alliance of Health Care Unions, which usually leads negotiations on wages — as well as with local chapters, which preside over bargaining on scheduling and other contract terms specific to union members’ various regions and roles.

The Alliance of Health Care Unions counts some 62,000 Kaiser workers across 23 local unions among its members. UNAC/UHCP, which represents workers in California and Hawaii, is the alliance’s largest unit.

Bargaining over local contracts soon resumed after the lull, with UNAC/UHCP saying in recent days that “real progress” had been made and many “conceptual agreements reached” in negotiations over 15 local agreements covering thousands of healthcare workers.

Kaiser had previously called the strike “unnecessary” and filed a lawsuit in January days before it was set to begin. In the lawsuit, Kaiser argued that UNAC/UHCP was not acting in good faith and accused the union of attempting “to coerce concessions” by compiling and threatening to release a report describing alleged unethical and unsafe practices by the company.

The report noted that the Oakland-based healthcare system’s corporate pension, Kaiser Permanente Group Trust, holds assets in CoreCivic and the GEO Group, the two largest for-profit prison corporations in the U.S. After the report’s release in mid-January, state Assemblymember Liz Ortega (D-San Leandro) introduced Assembly Bill 1799, which would require nonprofit health plans that receive significant state subsidies to disclose direct and indirect investments, including holdings tied to private prisons and immigrant detention.

Kaiser did not respond to a request for comment regarding its stance on the bill.

Anjetta Thackeray, a spokesperson for UNAC/UHCP, said Monday that Kaiser had yet to resume negotiations with the national bargaining table and that there were still many issues to resolve. But she said that because the union had “succeeded in bringing back serious negotiations,” it was important to get “members back to caring for patients and serving communities.”

“The statement had been made. … Members were able to shine a light on some issues,” Thackeray said. “We can’t call [the talks] closed just yet, but they are very, very close.”

A flashpoint had been the union’s request for raises of 25% over four years, arguing that the wage boosts are necessary to compensate for the far smaller increases workers received following previous contract negotiations in 2021, when they received a 2% raise in the first year. Kaiser said it had proposed 21.5% wage increases in October, describing it as its “strongest national bargaining offer ever.”

Kanakri, the Kaiser spokesperson, said the union had now accepted its 21.5% wage increase, and that the company had said for months that was the maximum amount it could offer.

Thackeray said she couldn’t yet provide details on pay or other agreements reached.

The cooling down in labor tensions comes even as other Kaiser workers pursue work stoppages.

About 2,400 mental health therapists, social workers and psychologists for Kaiser patients in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Sacramento, for example, announced Monday they had authorized a one-day strike — citing issues with the way Kaiser triages its mental health patients, using telephone operators and artificial intelligence instead of human therapists. A strike date has not yet been scheduled.

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s secretary of the economy, Marcelo Ebrard, urged “prudence” Friday in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidating part of President Trump’s sweeping tariff regimen.

“We have to see where this is going,” Ebrard told reporters. “We have to see what measures [Washington] is going to take to figure out how it is going to affect our country. “

Amid widespread concern about tariffs in Mexico — the United States’ major commercial partner, with almost $1 trillion in annual two-way trade — Ebrard cautioned: “I tell you to put yourselves in zen mode. As tranquil as possible.”

Across the globe, nations were assessing how the high court’s ruling might affect them. Some world leaders expressed relief or satisfaction with Friday’s decision.

“The justices have shown that even a US president does not operate in a legal vacuum. Legal boundaries have been set, the era of unlimited, arbitrary tariffs may now be coming to an end,” Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee, wrote on X.

Also writing on X, Canada’s trade minister, Dominic LeBlanc, referred to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Trump administration used to impose tariffs: “The United States Supreme Court’s decision reinforces Canada’s position that the IEEPA tariffs imposed by the United States are unjustified.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, when asked about the tariffs, said, “We’ll review the resolution carefully and then gladly give our opinion.”

Ebrard said he plans to travel to the United States next week to clarify matters.

Last year, Ebrard noted, Mexico managed to stave off Trump’s threats to impose a 25% across-the-board levy on all Mexican imports.

However, Mexico has been pushing back against Trump administration tariffs on imports of vehicles, steel and aluminum, among other products.

Among other impacts, the Supreme Court voided so-called fentanyl tariffs on Mexico, China and Canada. The Trump administration said it imposed those levies to force the three nations to crack down on trafficking of the deadly synthetic opioid.

In the aftermath of Friday’s ruling, Trump said he planned to seek alternative legal avenues to impose now-stricken tariffs.

About 85% of Mexican exports to the United States are exempt from tariffs because of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The accord extended a mostly free-trade regimen among the three nations, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The three-way pact is scheduled for joint review starting July 1. That date marks six years since the agreement was signed during the first Trump presidential term.

SAN LEANDRO — A start-up recycling company has a message for its potential, environmentally conscious customers: Don’t send your problem garbage to the landfill; put it on your front porch.

The company is Ridwell, and if you drive the residential streets of the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles, you’re likely to see the company’s signature white metal boxes on porches.

The boxes are for empty tortilla chip and plastic produce bags, used clothing, light bulbs and batteries. In some locations, polystyrene peanuts. All the things you’re not supposed to put in the blue recycle bin, but wish you could.

The Seattle-based waste service is geared toward people who worry their waste will end up in the landfill, or get exported to a developing country in Asia. They sort their waste into colorfully labeled canvas bags the company provides, and wait for a Ridwell pickup.

“Sorting is our special sauce,” said Gerrine Pan, the company’s vice president of partnerships. Part of the reason the company is successful at finding markets — or buyers — for its waste, she said, is that it’s sorted and pretty clean (unlike the food-contaminated jumble of waste that gets stuffed in many blue bins).

The company promises to distribute all that waste to specialty recyclers, manufacturers, even thrift shops.

But critics say the boutique waste hauler is not accomplishing anything environmentally useful and is selling the public a myth: that these plastics — multilayer plastic film, plastic bags, polystyrene — can be taken care of responsibly. The service would be benign, they say, if it stuck to the delivery of materials, such as light bulbs and batteries, that can be recycled.

Most local waste haulers don’t accept batteries and light bulbs because they can pose a hazard to workers and equipment.

The base Ridwell membership is $20 a month. For that, a driver will come by every two weeks and take the presorted bags to a warehouse where they’re emptied, the contents stacked and collected, until there’s enough to deliver to a facility that will take it.

Sorted recyclable items await transport at the Ridwell central warehouse.

Company lore is that founder Ryan Metzger and his son were frustrated that so many things weren’t accepted by their local hauler for recycling. The two sat down and researched where to take the stuff, then decided to scale up and serve their neighbors.

The company has since expanded to Vancouver, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Denver; Austin, Texas; Minneapolis and Atlanta. It now boasts more than 130,000 customers nationwide.

Most of the waste is delivered locally. But some of it travels hundreds, if not thousands of miles.

For instance, multilayer plastic bags — those that hold snack chips, candy and coffee beans — are the scourge of municipal garbage haulers because they cannot be recycled, and if put in the blue bins, can damage mechanical sorting machines. Ridwell, however, found Hydroblox, a company that melts the multilayer films into hard, plastic bricks that can be used for drainage projects in landscaping and road construction.

But this arrangement highlights some of the limitations of the nascent industry. Hydroblox owner Ed Greiser said he can take only so many chip bags. The company is growing, but it’s still pretty small, and he’s typically maxed out on the bags.

Ridwell workers sift through recyclables.

“This article is going to be a nightmare for me,” he told a Times reporter, because it’s likely to attract a parade of unsolicited garbage trucks looking to dump their bags. “I’m not the solution.”

In addition, Greiser’s two facilities are in Pennsylvania, more than 2,700 miles from most West Coast pickup points, a steep transportation cost for a plastic bag that could instead go 20 miles to a local landfill.

Ridwell also has recently expanded to serve customers outside its pickup cities. It sends special plastic bags to these far-flung subscribers so they can sort their waste and ship it back.

Again, critics say the company’s decision to operate a service that is dependent on plastic bags and requires extensive transport undermines their environmental bona fides. And they worry that a narrative suggesting all waste can be dealt with responsibly is false and misleading. That misconception, they say, contributes to the glut of plastic piling up in our rivers and oceans, and inside our bodies.

“There is typically a reason why a given product isn’t being recycled through curbside collection, and it usually isn’t for lack of effort by cities and counties,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste. “Most of the material being collected by boutique collection services like Ridwell are either very difficult to manage or lack strong recycling markets.”

Manufacturers of plastic packaging, not consumers, should pay for recycling products and packaging at the end of their life, he said. For regular people, “having to pay an extra fee to handle the unrecyclable plastic packaging that is thrust upon us every day is antithetical to every concept of producer responsibility.”

Earlier this month, the anti-plastic group Beyond Plastics published a disparaging report on boutique waste haulers, including Ridwell, accusing them of providing cover for plastic and packaging manufacturers who want people to believe their waste is being recycled.

A Ridwell employee inserts a bag of recyclables into a bailer at the San Leandro warehouse.

Ridwell offered a visitor a tour of its Bay Area warehouse in San Leandro. The spacious facility behind a Home Depot and Walmart was crowded with steel drums filled with alternating layers of batteries and fire-retardant pellets, boxes of light bulbs and piles of used clothes, all destined for recyclers, upcyclers and thrift stores.

While the public may think of recycling as a largely physical process, it’s actually a market: a function of how well a material can be profitably turned into something else.

Boxes of clothing await transport.

Metzger, Ridwell’s chief executive, said some of the material his company collects can be sold. Some of it is given away, “and some we pay to have responsibly processed.” The more technically challenging the plastic, the more likely Ridwell will have to pay to deal with it, he said.

He said the company vets all the places it sends its waste, giving preference to those that use items a second time over those that melt them down or shred them to make them into something else. It also gives preference to partners that are local.

He said his company is “careful not to present plastic recycling as a cure-all,” and it turns away some materials, for example vinyl shower curtains, “because we don’t have a downstream partner we can stand behind.”

And while Metzger agrees with many of Beyond Plastic’s concerns, he has observed that “when customers actively sort and see which items require special handling, it often increases their awareness of where plastic waste is coming from in their own lives … [leading] them to change purchasing habits and avoid certain packaging altogether.”