Hoffa's ghost haunts APhA delegation in L.A

Drug Store News, April 7, 1997 by Ken Rankin

Leaders of the American Pharmaceutical Association flirted with fire at the group's annual meeting in Los Angeles, but when the smoke cleared, they backed away from the flames.

One of the most contentious issues up for debate before the association's house of delegates called for putting APhA on record in support of pharmacists forming collective bargaining units under labor unions.

A resolution advanced by Colorado delegate Michael Johnson proposed repealing more than 30 years of APhA policy on pharmacist unionization, including a 1966 position declaring that "membership in a trade union is the antithesis of professional status for pharmacists."

Those policies were adopted at a time when some of the crustiest leaders of the labor movement, including Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa, were actively recruiting pharmacists as members.

Appalled by the prospect that gangland-style union leaders were representing a growing number of employee pharmacists, APhA leaders moved to discourage practitioner involvement with organized labor.

But that was then and this is now.

If there was any top-level opposition to Johnson's pro-union resolution among APhA's leadership, it wasn't apparent at the L.A. meeting.

Indeed, during a news conference with members of the pharmacy press, not a single one of the association's officers indicated that they would be at all uncomfortable with the proposal to reverse course and actively support pharmacist participation in labor unions.

For his part, Johnson stressed the benefits of pharmacist unionization, including protection from deteriorating working conditions and restrictions on work breaks that can result in medication errors that threaten patient safety.

"Today's unions are not the organizations they were in the past," he told the APhA House of Delegates. "Today's unions want to protect the pharmacist from the unscrupulous actions of some employers."

Johnson was far from the only APhAer ready to embrace organized labor as the remedy for pharmacy's workload concerns. During the meeting two of the association's top officers told me that unionization might well be a means of enhancing the delivery of quality pharmaceutical care.

During the final vote, however, APhA delegates agreed to back away from the unionization issue--at least temporarily--by remanding the resolution for further study by the association's Board of Trustees.

APhA's House of Delegates also dabbled with the prickly issue of therapeutic drug interchange under collaborative practice agreements with prescribers--an activity guaranteed to raise the hackles of organized medicine.

Again, the house backed away from the controversy, by voting to support the establishment of collaborative practice agreements, but not to support therapeutic interchange as a component of those agreements.

APhA also resisted the urge to break stride with community pharmacy leaders and support efforts by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy to develop a national pharmacist competence assessment examination that could be linked to pharmacist licensure renewal.

Instead, association members adopted a resolution drafted by California Pharmacists Association president John Tilley placing APhA in favor of a voluntary system of self-assessment for pharmacists, and opposed to the use of competence examinations as a requirement for the renewal of a pharmacist's license.