On Monday, pharmacists kicked off “Pharmageddon”; the three-day planned strike involves thousands of workers and is spread throughout locations in 10 different states. Pharmacists and workers are protesting the increasingly difficult working conditions in major retailers like CVS and Walgreens, as we described in a previous article.
Lannie Duong, a clinical pharmacist from California and a main organizer of the strike, said that the strike will conclude on Wednesday with protests directly in front of the CVS and Walgreen headquarters which are located in Deerfield, Illinois and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, respectively.
It is critical to note that these protests aren’t sparked by union mobilization in search for better pay or more benefits; the strike is organized with the simple demand that these major retailers hire more staff in order to alleviate the workload as well as eliminate policies that force them to work faster. Besides incentivizing more grueling conditions, pharmacists say the system as it exists now is simply too conducive to human error and as a result, they are more liable to make a mistake that can end up hurting a potential patient.
Pharmacists have been complaining about difficult working conditions since before the Covid-19 pandemic but only recently have they gone the extra step and started organizing. After a dozen CVS stores in the Kansas City area staged a walkout in September, the movement began gaining traction.
Pharmacists commented on the situation, but most wanted their names to be kept off record for fear that their employers would punish them for their actions. A common complaint, however, is that, in order to avoid a pileup of customers, pharmacists often find themselves doing a lot of grunt work that is outside of their regular mandate. “Every single one of us is jumping from customer to customer to customer all day long.”
According to in-store operational managers, major retail pharmacies are not only filling more prescriptions than ever but are also conducting a record number of vaccinations as the program becomes a bigger and bigger part of their company’s business.
“It’s definitely gone downhill, especially since the pandemic. I’m tired of leaving the front and going and crying in the pharmacy, drying my tears and then giving people a shot.”
CVS issued a statement that said, “In response to recent feedback from our pharmacy teams, we’re making targeted investments to address their key concerns, including enabling teams to schedule additional support as needed, enhancing pharmacist and technician recruitment and hiring, and strengthening pharmacy technician training.”
Pharmacists are not ignorant of their critical role in the healthcare industry and they understand that such a strike has the potential to have drastic consequences for customers who need to access medication; their strike isn’t an example of them not caring but rather a comment on the gravity of their complaints and their working conditions.
Visiting a major pharmacy in cities like New York or Washington D.C. will make it clear to an objective consumer that the day-to-day conditions of pharmacist workers are untenable and to say they are understaffed is all too obvious.
During a recent visit to a CVS I observed more than one disgruntled customer venting their indignation after waiting on line for over twenty minutes. Almost all of these individuals focused their anger on the only possible system representative, the pharmacists. It was clear by their reactions that they have become accustomed to such hostile behavior and they mostly ignored it, but it’s important to empathize with both the workers and the customers here to determine who’s really at fault: it is the corporation.
