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Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Guest Post: Pharmacist Walkouts: The Cost of Unchecked Incivility

The following is by my FIU colleague Kerri Stone.

Although not coordinated by any union, numerous Walgreens pharmacy staff from around the country have staged walkouts from their jobs, protesting what they cite as harsh working conditions. One of the cited contributing factors is the bullying and harassment that they have to endure at the hands of some patients. What’s more is that news outlets report that additional walkouts are planned for later this month.

This will hit home for many Americans, as prescriptions become harder to fill. But that same public needs to consider doing more to curb all forms of workplace abuse—like passing laws to prohibit workplace bullying by and of employees. While sex, race, disability, and other protected class-based harassment is already rendered unlawful, status-neutral bullying in the workplace remains lawful. It ought to be no surprise that pharmacists and those who work with them are targeted by abusive behavior that has reached levels that impede them from serving the public. They are far from alone.  

According to the recently conducted Violence Study of Healthcare Workers and Systems survey, which utilized almost 600 responses from 69 countries, the majority (63%) of critical care healthcare workers fall victim to on-the-job violence, and a quarter of those workers have said that they were willing to quit over this violence. This violence includes both physical violence and threats. Healthcare workers are not alone. In the face of unprecedented “air rage” and associated viral incidents since the pandemic, many are advocating for the passage of the “Protection From Abusive Passengers Act", which would authorize the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to create and oversee a program that would ban airline passengers from air travel if they act abusively toward airline employees.

 Last month, Senators Rubio and Manchin introduced the Safety from Violence for Healthcare Employees (“SAVE”) Act, which introduces new criminal penalties for physically assaulting healthcare workers. The rampant abuse and bullying that these workers have been forced to endure could have been stemmed greatly if a twenty-year-old Model Act that prohibits workplace bullying had been passed in any U.S. state.  Since 2003, the Workplace Bullying Institute has been advancing the Model Act—the Healthy Workplace Bill, authored by Professor David Yamada. While it has been introduced in 32 states, no state has passed it; only Puerto Rico has.

Workplace bullying seems to have been written off as something that need not be regulated, either because it is too trivial or because people should be able to navigate it themselves—or leave their employment, but this is not the case. Speaking tours of the families of those for whom workplace bullying led them to die by suicide address audiences regularly. The literature and studies on the topic show that the workforce has been impacted deleteriously by workplace bullying, with precipitous declines in workplace morale and productivity and increases in absenteeism and retention issues attributed to it. And yet, as Americans have remained unpersuaded that this behavior should be regulated in the workplace by law, just as Title VII regulates sexual and racial harassment. Believing, perhaps, that regulating bullying is best relegated to playground monitors, legislators have failed to do anything to curb some of the most insidious behavior that Americans inflict and endure.

If laws were passed in this country at the federal or state levels to prohibit workplace bullying, a larger-scale shift would likely have occurred whereby day-to-day abuse and incivility, while likely still problematic, would not be as unchecked and as rampant as they now are. The costs exacted by workplace bullying are neither always visible nor always felt directly by the general public, though everything from companies’ service to their prices arguably suffers from it. Rather, victims tend to suffer in silence and solitude, sometimes going so far as to leave their jobs altogether. When the abuse by the public of, for example, pharmacists, however, gets so intolerable that they walk out, as they have started doing this week, the public will feel the impact sharply and immediately. Society simply cannot function if those who serve as its engines cannot seek refuge and sanction from workplace abuse in the law. It may take an upending of aspects of day-to-day life before that public appreciates the gravity of all types of workplace abuse, whether it is inflicted by colleagues, customers, or supervisors.

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Posted by Howard Wasserman on October 24, 2023 at 09:31 AM in Employment and Labor Law | Permalink

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