Role changes for pharmacists may involve labor-union input

Abstract

Although the Pharmacy Practice Model Summit did not broach the subject of labor unions, pharmacists familiar with those organizations said their concerns must be considered when management wants to change employees’ roles. “Change is hard,” said David P. Zgarrick, chair of the pharmacy practice department at Northeastern University in Boston. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a unionized place or a large teaching hospital or a small community hospital,” he said. “Change is hard, particularly when you ask people who have maybe been doing something in a certain manner or a certain way for a number of years.” Zgarrick has been monitoring the status of labor unions in the pharmacy profession since early in his career, when he lived in Chicago. The city’s two largest groups of community pharmacists at the time belonged to unions. “In a case where you have a collective bargaining unit,” Zgarrick said, “you have to bargain with that unit . . . . Generally those job descriptions are actually part and parcel of that collective bargaining unit.”