Thousands of Walgreens pharmacy staff across the country are walking off work this week, alleging that poor working conditions are putting employees and patients at risk.

The walkout could impact hundreds of stores starting Monday and going through Wednesday, an organizer of the effort told The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company. It is unclear whether any pharmacies have stopped operations.

Pharmacists, technicians and support staff claim that increased demands on understaffed teams — such as administering vaccines while battling hundreds of backlogged prescriptions — have become untenable and are impeding their ability to do their jobs responsibly.

“When you’re a pharmacist, a missed letter or a number that’s wrong in a prescription could kill somebody,” the organizer said.

In a statement to The Post, Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman said the company recognizes that the last few years have been “unprecedented” and “a very challenging time.”

“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,” Engerman said. “We are engaged and listening to the concerns raised by some of our team members. We are committed to ensuring that our entire pharmacy team has the support and resources necessary to continue to provide the best care to our patients while taking care of their own well-being.”

“We are making significant investments in pharmacist wages and hiring bonuses to attract/retain talent in harder to staff locations,” he added, but did not provide further details. Staffing crunch

Employees are requesting that the company hire more pharmacy staff, establish mandatory training hours, offer transparency in how payroll hours are assigned to stores, and give advance notice when staff will be cut or when a position opens.

The collective actions, first reported by CNN, was inspired by a walkout of pharmacy employees at CVS locations in Kansas City a few weeks ago, the organizer said. Walgreens employees, like CVS, are not unionized, so the efforts came together on a subreddit for pharmacy staff.

Workers at both retailers share similar experiences, said Michael Hogue, chief executive of American Pharmacists Association, a membership organization representing industry professionals: Both are struggling to hire pharmacists and technicians because they don’t want to work in a high-stress environment with little support.

“We have a problem across the entire U.S. with inadequate staffing in community pharmacies,” he said.

Employees who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by the company said they are often the only pharmacist on staff for a 12-hour shift.

“There have been days where I worked alone or with [one] technician when there [are] over 300 prescriptions to fill,” an employee said. “That is not humanly possible along with your day-to-day tasks. As a pharmacist, that is verification, patient calls, vaccines, transfers, calling doctors, doing [medication management].”

The added pressure of administering vaccines has made it almost impossible to do their jobs responsibly, the organizer said. In one instance, a regional leader visiting the organizer’s store, as he was juggling thousands of prescription backlogs, told him to stop what he was doing and focus on vaccination appointments because “they give us better gross profit.”

There has also been an uptick in violence from customers frustrated over delays in filling their prescriptions or vaccine shortages, Hogue said.

“We’re having stories of patients coming in and screaming at the pharmacist and pharmacy technicians, violence … death threats,” he said. “It’s been really, really nasty and consumers are not patient.”

The decision to walk off the job is not one that pharmacists take lightly, but for many the action is unavoidable, Hogue said.

In a stressful or unsafe environment, pharmacists are trained to “stop, evaluate the situation, determine the circumstances around them and then take appropriate action to correct those circumstances so that they can proceed in a fully safe environment,” he explained. “So some pharmacies and some locations have determined that they cannot proceed safely without additional staff.”

  • Wwwbdd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean, 1.5m is a ton of money, but that’s not insane to me for a company with over 9,000 stores

    • 8bitguy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      She also received $20M in stock, and $4.
      5M in cash as a sign on bonus, as well as free use of a private jet and a yearly salary of $1.5M. CEOs deserve competitive compensation, it isn’t an easy job, but that’s enough to hire 163 pharmacists at an average of 150k/yr.

    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The base salary is generally a small fraction of a large company’s CEO’s earning potential IIRC

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Really what we need to be focusing on is the profit of the company. If the CEO makes $1.5M, sure that sucks but redirecting that to all the pharmacy staff (guessing 27K people) would net them only $55/year extra. Instead, what are their profits as that should be better distributed among the employees.

    • kiranraine@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      No one should be earning that much money period anyway. It’s excess while those below you suffer. I’m sure their board members make a nice sum too that is beyond excess of what anyone needs too. Max wages for the top and living wages for the bottom that make sense shouldn’t be that hard. Everyone should make enough to live and punish those at the top for pushing these conditions with skeleton crews.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s insane. CEO doesn’t do work to earn 1.5m. They’re just 1 person. No one can do ten people’s work.

          • mommykink@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            What argument are you making then? Be very clear, because a CEO making $1.5m base salary per year seems trivial for a company as large was Walgreens. It’s much lower than I would’ve expected TBH

            • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              Just because it’s lower than average doesn’t mean it’s not still too fucking high, don’t pretend you’re too thick to get that’s the point

              • mommykink@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                That really doesn’t seem too high to me, in all honesty. What would you think is a good yearly wage for a Walgreens CEO? According to Walgreens themselves, they employ 225,000 people. Imagine we get rid of the CEO entirely and distribute their pay to all of the workers (communism, yay), each Walgreens workers gets an extra… six bucks… per year. That’s not really the issue you make it out to be

                • kiranraine@reddthat.com
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                  1 year ago

                  No one should ever earn that much and that doesn’t include the stocks and everything else. Your arguments are defending the corporate elite. Stop being a bootlicker and believing all the propaganda that they deserve that much in pay.

                  • mommykink@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    You’re begging the question, why should no one earn that much? The $1.5m is a puny salary for that job position. It’s not unheard of for medical workers (as in, the workers themselves, not just executives) to earn more than that. I’m not defending the corporate elite, your brain is rotten from too much time on the internet. I just don’t understand where the argument that $1.5m per year is some ungodly salary for the CEO of one of the largest pharmacy chains in the country that employs a nearly a quarter million people.

                • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  If you think the argument “they’re paid too much” is rebutted in any way with “durrrrr but that’s 6 dollars for everyone” then you aren’t ready for these conversations

                  It’s a lot more complex than spreading their yearly salary to their workers, and anyone with any grasp of how companies, the rich, and corporate structure bullshit would know that. People with simplistic grasps (or ulterior motives to spread misinformation) of the world boil it down to “spread the wealth equally” because it’s a fucking stupid idea and easy to attack

        • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          It’s low to you because we’ve normalized these exorbitant base salaries and insane options ($20M or whatever). It wasn’t always like this.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      How is it not insane? It’s not like they’re personally overseeing all those stores. And it sounds like they’re running the company into the ground. I’d take that job for a lot less money and probably be better at it.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      How much would we pay the CEO for half that many stores but run properly instead of bare bones?

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I will do it for half of that. And given that CEO actions and corporation performance shows evidence of being independent of each other I will do as well as he does. You can use half of my salary to pay for more pharmacists.