Editor’s note: After a long fight, CVS workers have gained better wages and healthcare in a tentative agreement. Watch these pages for developments.
On the morning of October 18, CVS workers in Los Angeles made their way to the stores where they work, but not to fill prescriptions or to help customers, as they normally would. Instead, unionized workers with UFCW Local 770 went on strike against the company that for the past five months has been disrespecting worker demands at the negotiating table and illegally retaliating against those who have been trying to win a fair contract.
Local 770 represents not just one CVS pharmacy, but all of them in LA, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties. The contract, which expired in June, covers workers all over the state of California—more than 7,000 in eight locals.
Kathy Finn, president of UFCW Local 770, explained, “The workers at CVS are on an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike that protests illegal activity of the company. They have been intimidating and retaliating against them for their union activity. Workers fighting for a fair contract have had their schedules changed or hours cut. The company has tried to prevent people from meeting with their union rep or having the union reps present at the store or allowing them to talk to workers.”
This illegal anti-union activity during the contract campaign was the grounds for the ULP, but the workers on strike are simultaneously demanding that the company return to the negotiating table and bargain in good faith for a fair contract with pay increases, affordable healthcare, and adequate store staffing.
“Basically, they are being uncompromising on all levels,” said Kristona Carlton, a pharmacy technician at CVS and a member of the union bargaining team. During the contract negotiations, the company requested a mediator, instead of negotiating directly with the unionized workers.
“We never see them… they just send the mediator… they never talk to us,” Carlton asserted.
Workers at the bargaining table have been tirelessly trying to explain to the company how difficult it is to live with the current wages because LA is costly, and no one can live on less than $20 an hour.
Meanwhile, last year, CVS made $11 billion in profits, $3.1 billion of which went toward paying shareholders, who don’t lift a finger to produce any of it. “It would only take a small portion of that amount to give these workers a living wage and affordable healthcare which they currently don’t have,” Finn pointed out.
“In the last nine years, I’ve never had health insurance through CVS because I can’t afford it,” said Melissa Acosta, another pharmacy technician, about her time as an employee of one of the nation’s largest and most powerful healthcare providers. The majority of the workers do not have healthcare at all, or they are on a government program, or they get healthcare from a relative. The point is, that they cannot afford the company plan.
Moreover, CVS creates internal, arbitrary hierarchies to divide workers and deny them union benefits. For instance, Acosta discussed the need for greater equity between A stores and B stores, especially in terms of healthcare and pensions. A stores, considered the “original” stores, have a pension and healthcare plan through the union. The B stores are the later stores, and “we are not part of the pension, or the healthcare provided by our union, so we have to depend on the company’s health coverage, and we have no pension,” Acosta explained.
CVS is a healthcare company, yet the workers cannot afford healthcare. “They don’t want to come up with something that is reasonable. CVS says they have heart. They say that they care about the customers, but they don’t care about their employees. Why would you have to pay a $95 co-pay on medication, and you’re working for a healthcare company that’s supposed to be helping you save money?” Carlton protested.
At bargaining, the workers have proposed several options for CVS to make their healthcare better and affordable, however, the company refuses to listen. Alternatively, the company responds with unreasonable proposals that defeat the purpose of the original ask.
The tiers between stores contribute to healthcare accessibility issues and highlight the company’s inadequate staffing as well as unstable shift practices. The workers at “A stores” have to work 24 hours a week for healthcare, whereas at “B stores” workers are required to put in at least 31 hours for insurance. But the company does not give people enough hours and when they do, they expect an unreasonable commitment to working at any moment, on any day, whenever demanded by management.
“The only reason I get my 40 hours is I say I have no restrictions; I say I am always available. We don’t have set work shifts. At the pharmacy, we open at 8 a.m. and close at 9 p.m. You can work one day in the morning and come the next day and have to work at night. Or you can work at night and have to work the next day in the morning. Nothing is ever set,” Carlton said.
Acosta explained that workers would like the company to “loosen up the availability so we don’t have to be available Saturday and Sunday. We’d like to be available either Saturday or Sunday. We shouldn’t be required to work Saturday and Sunday just to get little or no hours from them anyways.”
Both Acosta and Carlton are leaders in their workplaces, and when discussing with their co-workers the state of negotiations, and the issues that all CVS workers go through, they found widespread discontent and a desire to fight back.
“At this point, people are really fired up. They see the way they’ve been treated by CVS and they see what our message is and we’re union strong. We want a better contract for all our stores that are union, and we’d love to have our non-union stores become union, and we’re in the works for organizing those stores as well,” Acosta said.
“My pharmacy team. They’re ready! They’re like ‘When are we going to strike? It’s been a long time.’ We’ve been negotiating since May. Our contract expired in June. And here it is, it’s October. Still nothing. So they were like ‘When are we going to strike? When are we going to walk so they can get the point?’,” Carlton added.
At the strike rally, held in the parking lot of a strip mall where one of LA’s striking CVS stores is located, the president of Local 770 encouraged the workers who have “taken the ultimate sacrifice of deciding to withdraw their labor and go out on strike,” adding that they need community support. “Nobody is trying to get rich. We are just trying to get a fair contract,” Finn declared.
Former CVS CEO Karen Lynch made $21 million last year. When speaking to the crowd of workers and community supporters, Kristona Carlton made her feelings clear: “As a CVS worker, this pisses me off and makes me wonder how come the CEO of CVS gets paid millions of dollars, but the company can’t make their pharmacy safe. How come the CVS executives say they can’t afford to give their employees a reasonable contract? This only shows us that CVS has no heart.”
“Today is a good day for CVS workers because we are banding together to make our voices heard…by shutting down our pharmacy windows, shutting down the whole store today and days to come if CVS continues to disrespect us,” she added.
The lack of adequate staffing of the stores and training of the employees causes safety problems. “The lack of sufficient staffing contributes to unsafe working conditions. About two years ago, I was robbed at gunpoint. The store was robbed. Someone jumped the counter. Someone came behind and held a gun to my head. Because of that, I suffer from PTSD,” Carlton shared with the crowd.
Pointing to the need for unity between workers and customers, Carlton asked community members to not cross the picket line, encouraging those at the rally “Let’s all be on strike.”
Finn added further context to Carlton’s testimony, explaining how the union at bargaining has made pleas to CVS “over and over again to make the stores safer, even to just provide time for workers to do safety training. All the training that’s required to do, they have to do it while they are working with customers.”
The company does not provide adequate training to its employees, forcing them to “multi-task” instead of carving out separate time to complete the required training. “We’re doing training on the computer and simultaneously helping a customer or simultaneously filling a prescription,” Acosta told People’s World. This disregard for workers’ training does not allow for people to concentrate, causes people to miss a lot of information, and often forces them to go back and repeat the same lessons, causing huge burdens further down the line and putting workers at risk of reprimand.
“They don’t want to give us time allotted just to do training that supposedly they spend so much money on. And then they hold us accountable for the policies that we don’t even know because we haven’t been trained correctly,” Acosta explained. “There are repercussions to not following company policies, such as losing a job.”
At the same time that CVS neglects to give employees proper time to complete the required training, which could contribute to safety, another issue is that they refuse to hire more staff. CVS locks its doors and cabinets to prevent theft of items like toiletries and household products but does not employ enough staff to reliably respond to customers who want the locked items.
“CVS is more concerned about their toothpaste than they are about workers’ safety,” said Yvonne Wheeler at the strike rally. Wheeler is president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the second largest central labor body in the nation with over 300 affiliated union and labor organizations representing more than 800,000 members. Regarding locked doors and cabinets in stores, Wheeler commented, “I don’t like it. It treats everyone as if they are criminals. But they barely even have enough staff to unlock those items.”
Ultimately, this is another point of evidence to conclude that CVS does not care about anything but their profits. “No one who works full time should have to choose between feeding their families or paying for a roof over their heads. CVS has no heart! And they are shameful,” Wheeler admonished.
As one of the leaders of the community and the broader labor movement present in solidarity with the striking workers, Wheeler emphasized the hypocrisy at the root of CVS’s corporate greed, arguing that their failure to provide comprehensive and affordable healthcare to its workers “is not just a failing of the company. This is a betrayal of its core mission” as a healthcare provider. Wheeler added, “We are in this fight for justice, for dignity, and for the health and wellbeing of these workers, but also for our community.”
“To the community, I want to say, we must support these essential, frontline workers, who are there to care for us when we need them. CVS shame on you! Stop playing games. Stop breaking the law. And get back to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith a fair contract,” Wheeler exclaimed.
Finn also reserved a special call to the new CEO of CVS, David Joyner, whose first day on the job coincided with the start of the workers’ strike. “I would like to reach out to David Joyner, the new CEO. Brand new … First day on the job and he’s got a strike to deal with,” Finn stated. “Hey David Joyner, I’m Kathy Finn. Let’s talk. Let’s resolve this. Let’s make sure the workers get a fair deal, let’s get them some fair pay, let’s get them some affordable healthcare, let’s make sure the stores are safe, let’s make sure that there are enough workers, enough hours, and enough staff to provide customer service, and let’s all work together to make CVS the best drug store they can be. Everybody agree we should do that? Hopefully, David Joyner agrees, so call me up.”
Organizer for UFCW locals 3000 and 770, Todd Crosby, underscored CVS’s monopolization of drug stores and healthcare, explaining that the problem comes from a combination of “greed plus power. They control Aetna, which is one of the largest insurers and doctor networks in the country. They control a big part of the market for doctors. They control Caremark, so they control a big piece of the market for drugs. And they have a large share of brick-and-mortar retail. Add it all up and that’s a lot of power they are using against both workers and local communities.”
During COVID, CVS workers were there for the community. “We were open. Everybody was sick. Everybody was scared. And we were the ones who were open and helping customers,” Acosta testified. “It was really scary. We were all worried that we’d get sick and not be able to go to work and bring that to our families. I’d like to say people were nice to us, but they weren’t… we’ve been treated pretty poorly,” she remarked.
“As far as the customers, they should support us. I think that the customers should support us because we were there during COVID. We never shut down during COVID. We opened other places to help test for COVID. So, we need the customers to help us how we helped them during a trying time,” added Carlton. Workers on strike at CVS called on customers to show solidarity by “not crossing the picket lines, transferring their medicines to other union-friendly stores, like grocery stores that have pharmacies, instead of staying here supporting basically CVS’s greed.”
Among the organizations that came to support the CVS workers were Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE). Elected officials at the city and state levels were present and gave speeches of encouragement. At the end of the various speakers’ remarks, the religious leaders of CLUE led a “Blessing of the Hands” for the workers.
Jennifer Gutierrez of CLUE explained the reasoning behind this ceremony as part of a Christian “tradition of anointing the hands of healers… to guide them in that work.” Gutierrez added that the clergy wanted to anoint the hands of the CVS workers who are “healers in their own right.” Another reason for the anointment of the hands was because the workers “are entering a new struggle for healing, that’s what this strike is about,” Gutierrez concluded.
In an interview with People’s World, Finn placed this strike in the broader context of an intensifying and growing labor struggle in Los Angeles and across the nation. “Over the last several decades, corporate greed has become a way of life in this country,” Finn said. “Politicians and those in power see it as okay for a few people to concentrate all the power and wealth in this country in the hands of a CEO class. CEO pay has risen astronomically while the pay of average workers—working-class people—has gone down. And the productivity of workers has gone up,” she added, pointing to the extreme inequality working-class people face today as part of a longer trajectory in the wrong direction.
“In the last few years, a lot of unions and workers have come together to try to change that,” Finn stated. “And workers are fed up. They’re ready. They want to come together to build power and be part of unions that are fighting back. And that’s part of what this is. This is a fight back against corporate greed.”
“It wasn’t until we had our Unfair Labor Practice Strike Vote that the company decided to negotiate with us for more than like 4 hours,” Acosta confirms.
On October 24, after a three-day strike and months of exasperating negotiations with the company, the CVS workers on strike secured a tentative agreement that delivers better wages, more secure staffing, and a more affordable healthcare plan for B stores. Now union members can review the offer and vote on it. The tentative agreement shows how building worker power can deliver huge successes, even if after much frustration and sacrifice.
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