Yeah well…
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Totally my bad!
Thanks for catching that.
Oops.
But now… I won’t buy toothpaste at Walgreens!
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No problem! I knew Walgreens wasn’t a part of Walmart, but I thought it had been spun off in the 90s. Turns out, it never was! So I learned something myself.
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Walgreens the store can choose to take a stand, but in this case they would be forcing employees to take a risk and I find that unacceptable.
How would you react if your boss said you needed to do something that might land you in jail, even if unjustly?
Once you add legal costs it’s almost certainly selling at a loss.
Yes, better to let women die from an unwanted pregnancy… /s
So the lunch counter workers should not have served sit-in protesters. And they didn’t, and it wasn’t because they were racist, no… they just feared for their jobs! /s
One either has a moral center, or they don’t. “I might get in trouble” is no excuse for moral cowardice.
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This is precisely the counterpressure @DukeTrout was suggesting above, which is great to see. However, we haven’t seen anyone else step up and agree to sell them into red states (I’m looking at you, CVS).
From my perspective, a boycott does nothing but shift some money around unless someone actually agrees to support Women here. CVS is gaining a windfall of prescriptions without having done anything yet. They have a real opportunity if they act affirmatively here.
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I might go to jail and leave my dependents with no income, become unemployable because I’ve been arrested/convicted, have my professional certifications revoked-there are many levels of “getting into trouble” that make absolutist statements hard to swallow. One person might choose to take the risk, and another might choose to safeguard the ones they are responsible for.
I’d say “if following that policy is a condition of my employment here (one I happen to agree with), you’ll have to update my employment agreement to indemnify me.” And indeed, the employer may already have such a clause in the agreement if the state labour law doesn’t already protect workers.
Pharmacists in particular have special agreements when they work for someone else. Their employees can’t risk their certifications by violating their professional standards, but they also have to follow their employers’s policies.
Part of Walgreens’ cowardice here comes down, as it always does with corporate “persons”, to money. They don’t want to go to the trouble of indemnifying employees in backwards states so they decided to cave to the fascists nationwide instead. That’s also why Newsom is telling Walgreens that California won’t do business with the company: he’s not about to let Mississippi or Alabama set the business environment in his state.
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As if people working at Walgreens can’t GO GET ANOTHER JOB. The same is NOT true of women who can’t access health care when they need it. Having a child or dying in childbirth from an unwanted pregnancy is a life changing event in the way that changing jobs is not.
There is NO reason to pretend like what is happening in this country is NOT happening. Changing jobs is a inconvenience for most people. Bearing children, especially WHEN ONE DOES NOT WISH TO DO SO, is far more than that…
We’re fucking PEOPLE, not broodmares… FFS.
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There are a million ways to protest without risking your job. In this specific case, imagine another chain stepping up and doing the right thing. You can move your prescriptions. You can tell others to move their prescriptions and make them aware of this issue at work, school, at home, with friends, etc. You can fund and support (or volunteer with!) the organizations trying to make a difference. You can push to elect non-assholes. And that’s just the list I came up with in thirty seconds.
Everyone’s capacity to do something is different. But there are many, many things you can do that don’t require personal risk. Not everyone has that choice, but most do. “I’m not going to do anything because I’m afraid personally” is in essence, just a way to say, “this isn’t important enough to me to research what I can do within my safety margins.”
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And of course the real target of our ire here is not employees of Walgreens, but the company policy and those who set it.
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Which costs? The costs of fighting a frivolous suit from state AGs looking to score political points or the costs of fighting the DoJ for violations of actual federal law?
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Did I not see something in the letter or the stories where they were threating individual employees? Either with jail or being individually named in law suits?
To me, it looked like the only threat was civil suits against the company. Based on that, no individual local store employee would be in any danger at all.
It looks entirely like the federal government said this is fine, some states say it’s not for reasons, and those states are threatening lawsuits if sales are made. Preemptively threatening where they don’t even need to prove that their reasons are valid.
It’s just ultra risk aversion, or perhaps leadership who sets company policy is in agreement.
If everyone had access to multiple pharmacies, so be it use a different one. But, there are lots of areas where there isn’t any choice, there’s only one. Those areas also line up with where these threats are being made. They’re a pharmacy, and regulated as such. It’s not just some random general store. They should act like the pharmacy they claim to be and provide all pharmacy services or they should close up shop and let someone else be the pharmacy.
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Wasn’t walgreens the place where they previously had pharmacists refusing to fill a script for plan B?
Maybe this is just Walgreens’ culture and all the hand wringing is beside the point. As for closed shops… wouldn’t it be nice if there were instead many smaller local pharmacies who were harder to intimidate at a national level?
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Why do you hate jobs?!? So what, a few women are oppressed, isn’t what really matters is Walgreen’s bottom line!?!/s
Nah! Everyone knows that large corporations are better for everyone! /s
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It seems California is having none of it: https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1632816672078741505?s=20
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For anyone from the UK and Ireland:
Walgreens is owned by the same company who own Boots. Let them know we will not tolerate this bullshit on this side of the Atlantic either.
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