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Following a series of walkouts by pharmacy workers at retail giants CVS and Walgreens, organizers have formed The Pharmacy Guild, a group meant to help unionize retail pharmacy employees.
Across the US, the workers have long expressed concern over short-staffing and high workloads that they say can jeopardize patient safety. Historically, there’s been no widespread retail pharmacy worker unionization, Shane Jerominski, one of the founding advocates behind the guild, told Healthcare Brew.
“We’re speaking out to help frontline pharmacy professionals organize a national union […] and also trying to organize a group that’s really keyed in on all of the problems facing community pharmacists and retail pharmacy,” Jerominski said.
The guild’s priority is advocating for retail pharmacies to implement staffing and workload standards that ensure pharmacists have time to provide adequate care. It’s not intended just for workers at the “big three” retail pharmacies (CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid); it’s meant for pharmacy workers who feel that being “inadequately staffed” puts “patient safety at risk,” Jerominski said.
Jerominski runs a social media account called The Accidental Pharmacist that sheds light on issues facing retail pharmacy workers. Two figures behind other popular pharmacy-related social media phenomena—the #PizzaIsNotWorking movement and the RXComedy meme and news account—were also involved in forming The Pharmacy Guild, which is working with IAM Healthcare, a union that represents 10,000 healthcare workers in the US and Canada.
Pharmacy workers can fill out a form on the guild’s website to express their interest in unionizing. The plan is for the guild to see which pharmacies express the most interest, and then help workers organize, Jerominski said, adding that he believes the first stores will be unionized under the guild during the first few months of 2024.
“I think that this is unique and novel because it’s peer-to-peer,” he said. “The way that we’re organizing is so much different than the classic unionization model. We don’t have to go in and deploy resources until we’re certain that we’re going to be able to win elections.”
In addition to unionizing, The Pharmacy Guild intends to represent the specific needs of retail pharmacy workers. Many professional pharmacy organizations don’t have much retail pharmacy representation, and because of that, “it seems like all of our concerns get pushed to the sideline,” Jerominski said. “We want to be able to wield some influence on regulation within our own practice settings.”
Jerominski said The Pharmacy Guild has already seen a large amount of interest from pharmacy workers: the first day the site went live, it had 30,000 visitors.
“Now is the time to regain control of our profession in the name of patient safety,” Jerominski said in a statement. “Unless we unionize, pharmacists and technicians will continue to be exploited for profits while megacorporations underinvest in the needs of our patients.”