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.”