Walgreens pharmacy staff walk out, citing unsafe working conditions
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.”
“We also understand the immense pressures felt across the U.S. in retail pharmacy right now,”
Translation: We've cut our staff to barebones so that the CEOs can buy their annual new yacht and won't hire enough people to man the operations.
The Walgreens in my town has started closing their pharmacy early because they don’t have enough staff to run it.
Every retail place I walk into these days is staffed minimally. One untrained cashier manning 4-6 self checkout registers. 0 manned registers open. Warehouse stores with half a dozen workers on the floor.
I check on my way in these days to see that they have registers open if I'm buying a cart full of groceries or if i'm buying products that require barcodes to be scanned out of a book. I stood at a self checkout register in Lowes the other day for 10 minutes because someone wanted a 5 gallon bottle of water, someone had problems scanning a barcode and I had a hand full of nuts and bolts. The cashier was about to have a breakdown. Costco has barcodes you need to scan for muffins. but us mortals are not allowed to use the barcode scanners, we are required to either wait out the shared cashier, or lug the 25lb item into the scanning table then god forbid put the item back in the cart, those two cases of soda you scanned might.... you know, i don't know exactly why they need those huge items on the scale. Nothing is making sure your cart is empty at any point, there's no lane hawk. They're checking receipts 100% at the door.
When I was young, I was sold that there would be robots and air delivery, This dystopian 1984 retail hellscape is bullshit.
Shopping is so depressing and stressful now. You can't flag down employees to ask a question anymore, everybody has been handed the work of 1.5 people on a good day. These employees are spread so thin and it's impossible not to notice.
We have several in my city and you'll randomly walk in to find that their pharmacy is closed in the middle of the afternoon. It's been a real PITA to deal with since my parents are both elderly with lots of prescriptions that I pick up. I've had to drive 20 miles away to a different Walgreens to get insulin, spent hours on the phone trying to transfer stuff from one location to another because they can't maintain their hours, wait in the lobby for an hour to get an urgent prescription filled, etc. I really hate their service but our other options are pretty limited since all the independent pharmacies closed down and their old pharmacy through BiMart shut down.
I experienced the same frustrations with our Walgreens, and thought that was as bad as it could get. Then my health insurance plan mandated that we all stop using in-person pharmacies and switch to this stupid mail delivery system. You know what’s worse than having to wait for Walgreens to open so you can talk to a pharmacist? Sitting on hold hoping to talk to the one anonymous random pharmacist Optum has on staff. Want to transfer a prescription? Having trouble with a particular manufacturer or generic? Good luck.
I worked in healthcare up until recently. Our executives were constantly spouting those same phrases while cutting staff and benefits to the bone. They never miss a chance to screw their employees. Also we were chronically short staffed but they had us under hiring freezes basically all the time. By the time we could hire again everyone was so burned out most of our hires quit and we were back at square one under a hiring freeze again. It's not "difficult to staff" it's difficult to staff when you have to fill 20 positions in 6 weeks or get your openings closed out.
ohh yeah we're understaffed, but we'll be hiring in a month, don't you worry!
Sounds like IT in a nutshell too unfortunately.
just for reference people... walgreens cannot afford to pay the costs of have a full compliment of their life-saving function of pharmacist...
but the CEO gets 1,500,000.00 per year BASE.
welcome to the united states, where the points are made up and none of the humans matter
I mean, 1.5m is a ton of money, but that's not insane to me for a company with over 9,000 stores
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.
Yeah, specifying "base salary" seems pretty disingenuous. It's all about the add-ons.
The base salary is generally a small fraction of a large company’s CEO’s earning potential IIRC
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.
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.
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.
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.
How much would we pay the CEO for half that many stores but run properly instead of bare bones?
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.
Wife and I took all our business away from Walgreens after Walgreens decided to stand with the far right and not provide em emergency contraceptives.
Now that hyvee pharmacy is becoming trash, we've decided to go with Costco.
My first pickup at their pharmacy today was pleasant af
I did the same and went to an independently owned pharmacy. It's been great. The only downside is no Sunday hours and a half day Saturday but that's not a deal breaker.
Our small town pharmacy delivers at no extra charge. I’m never looking back.
Support local and independent!
When Walgreens started denying people abortion and/or birth control pills and whatever the fuck else I stopped giving them my business.
Fuck Walgreens.
Same. I work right across the street from one. Haven't stepped in it since.
Fuck Walgreens.
When I worked at one of their distribution centers and quit within two months , I stopped giving them my business.
Hi, I am an independent pharmacist.
If you have an independent within 5 miles of you - USE IT. The time driving there is negated by how much faster your meds will be ready. And it's actually fun to visit an independent that staffs well vs. A corporate place that sabotages itself.
I feel like on Lemmy this should be preaching to the choir :)
I finally switched to an independent one after years of using Walgreens. Walgreens was fine for the most part until I changed names. Then the system could not figure out who the fuck I was and the staff could never successfully merge my accounts. Annoying but whatever. What made me switch was Walgreens having the policy of not filling misoprostol and mifepristone in states where abortion is restricted. It is not illegal to give those drugs in those states but Walgreens decided it was best to not fill those drugs in those states.
wait what? A pharmacy in the US is allowed to deny you prescribed medicine based on some arbitrary state level rules that do not affect the prescription medicine itself?
Generally in the US, anyone can refuse a service for any reason unless it's expressly prohibited, like race.
My psych recommended a local one that's been fucking fantastic. Rolling through rheumatoid arthritis meds at a kroger or walgreens probably would have ended with sudoku without them.
I've had chain pharmacists gaslight me about getting meds through insurance. It was my fault they were calling the wrong number and I must not understand the process. Somehow my independent has never needed more than a day to get anything worked out.
I can leave the clinic and by the time I get to my pharmacist (like 5min) my scripts are ready. They know my name and ring it up as I walk in. I fucking love it.
How do I find you?
I googled pharmacies and 100% of them are supermarkets and major chains. I'd love to switch.
Try 'independent pharmacies near me?'
Very Helpful! Thank you!
I found a couple and already reached out to them!
And if my other comment doesn't help if you pm me your city I can take a look as well.
Great to hear they're walking out! I recently offered to take a friend visiting from Australia to a Walgreens to see first hand how flimsy and shabby the US can be.
Every Walgreens looks like a store staffed by people who know that their boss wants to pay them less except it's illegal. You can smell the exploitative labour practices when you walk in the door.
Crazy thing is that Walgreens used to be a decent store in the 80s, but the stores have been staffed with fewer and fewer staff since the 90’s. Now they seem surprised that an 4000sf store can be run by two clerks, a pharmacist, and a guard that stands by the door.
It does always have that air of one of a dollar store mixed with an urgent care mixed with that one gas station open on Christmas Eve at 11pm
I don’t use Walgreens but my local CVS is the same. Everyone in the pharmacy section is running around with their hair on fire. They have to close for 30 minutes a day to get a lunch break. And most of the time they are all still pleasant to talk to. I don’t see how they do it.
Same here, I do pickups at a CVS daily and always see the same like 3 people behind the counter, always running around like a chicken with it's head cut off. It's a very quick and simple task of just swapping my empty tub with their tub full of outgoing packages, but there have been days where I've stood there for 10 minutes waiting for one of the poor souls back there to have the 5 seconds to swap tubs with me. I always feel bad for them.
I'm sure CVS pharmacists/ techs will follow Walgreens once this happens.
This is wild. My family and I just had vaccines done at Walgreens on Friday. The lady who did the vaccination quite nearly fucked up and gave my son an adult dose. She caught herself and pulled it out before injecting, but it was a near thing. It was quite obvious that she was completely rushing everything and was completely overwhelmed.
I went to Walgreens for my first and second round of covid vaccines. Each visit was an absolute shit show. First shot I had to wait a half hour for someone to give it to me. The line of customers in store and at the drive thru was constant, and there were only two people working. Second shot, same situation, and I waited an hour and a half. When the pharmacist finally called me in and saw what time my appointment was for, she said "well I wouldn't have waited." Motherfuck, you think I'm trying to die of covid?
Since then I've gotten my boosters at CVS. It's directly across the street and it's where I have all my prescriptions. The least amount of people I've seen working in the pharmacy is four. Usually it's six. There may be a car or two ahead if I try to use the drive thru, if so, I'll just walk in because there is almost never a line inside.
I 100% support these workers walking out. Fuck Walgreens. That place has always been nasty and run down, even the new ones.
I completely understand hating Walgreens, but I would like to point out that CVS is worse in nearly every way possible. If you have a choice, a local pharmacy would be a better option if you're looking for somewhere with ethics and a fast turn around.
CVS owns their own prescription coverage company, CVS CareMark, and their own health insurance company, Aetna. If you are unfortunate enough to be given this coverage by your employer, they will deny everything all the time. They will require you get your prescriptions through CVS. If CVS does not carry the medication you need, they will simply refuse to pay for it. For example, medication my daughter needed for her kidneys to function properly, CVS only carried adult doses and not pediatric ones. I spent two years arguing with them and got about 6 months of it paid for in the end. In the meantime, I just spent thousands out of pocket because my daughter needs kidneys.
Granted, that's anecdotal. But feel free to just Google CareMark or Aetna and see the numerous lawsuits for gouging and mismanagement, the complaints over inability to get them to cover things that should be covered, the BBB complaints about wrong prescriptions and wrong amounts.
CVS is my personal devil. I hate them more than any other company in the world. I hate them in a preoccupied, obsessive kind of way. Please go local if possible.
Not to discount or diminish your experience but I’ve had the polar opposite with Aetna/CVS.
Due to unfortunate circumstances my family has had nearly 300 claims via Aetna over the past 24 months with only one hitch that required any legwork on my side. We pick up all our ad hoc prescriptions at the local Walgreens and all of our maintenance meds shipped via an independent provider. Only one script has ever been mandated to go through Caremark and it’s was a specialty drug that ran about $1000 US per daily dose.
Legit had my latest covid shot yesterday at Wallgreens. I was waiting for half an hour and, while waiting, I heard someone talking to a different customer on a phone call. They said they had a backlog of ~600 prescriptions and that they shouldn't rush to come pick up theirs.
When I finally got into get my shot, they legit had to move garbage bins out of the way.. Like literal garbage next to an injection site.
These workers deserve everything they ask for.
I got my prescriptions filled at a Walgreens for a little while. The minimum amount of time I was in the store for a simple pickup of a prescription I had been told was “ready” was twenty minutes. They were obviously understaffed, but I never saw the same person twice. I had to show them my ID and insurance card every time, and I’m not even taking anything that can be abused. After my fourth or fifth agonizing visit, which took almost an hour, I searched for “independent pharmacy” as soon as I got home.
The independent pharmacist knows me by sight, is completely reliable, and has solved problems several times over the years. Doctors and nurses usually say something nice about her when I tell them which pharmacy I use. I will never go to a chain pharmacy again, and recommend that others don’t, either.
I appreciate OP putting the whole article here. I clicked the link, raged at the paywall and came here to bitch, only to find the article in it's entirety. Thank you.
We used a pharmacy that was inside of the regional grocery store we use that was owned by the grocery store. They recently contracted that part of the business out to Walgreens. My wife got strep and bronchitis and got a prescription that we had filled there. They tool litterally all day to fill it despite being told it would take two hours. The only way to speed it up was to sit in a grocery store with communicable illness for an hour. They encouraged her to do that.
Glad they're doing this. They never have enough people working. I feel for the pharmacy workers.
GOOD. Very proud of my pharmacy colleagues standing up for themselves. More unions, please!
I have been using an independent local pharmacy for a good year now. I can get a Rx filled in 5 minutes. Rarely do I have to wait more than 10 minutes. I take 8 medications daily. Only once did I have to wait until next day and they’ve kept it in stock for me ever since.
We used to have a great independent pharmacy. It closed down a few years ago. :(
I went to my local Walgreens for vaccines a few weeks ago. The poor pharmacist was run ragged. His hands shook as he gave me the shots, and he was sweating profusely. My speculation is that he was on some sort of uppers to make it through his shift. I don't know how anyone can work under those conditions.
My local Walgreens is always a 30 minute wait. It's very inconvenient. Sometimes they close the "vaccines only" window because so many people try to use it to cut the pharmacy line there, which never works but slows them down even more.
Then they have people yell at them for taking a lunch break on Sundays.
And the occasional drug addict that verbally assaults them because the drugs are on a delay timer.
I’m sure Bidenomics will fix it. :-/
We're still trying to recover from Reaganomics backlash.
Don’t I already know!