'Homely' Boots treats its staff like red revolutionaries
The pharmacy is a high street favourite. But its attitude to the negotiating rights of its workers is anything but healthy
It's trusted by
families across Britain. But questions are being asked about what lies
beneath its cosy image Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian
No child dreams of growing up to become a pharmacist. They are
never romantic leads or action heroes in films. As far as a search of my
bookshelves and the web can tell, they are not the heroes and heroines
of novels either. Doctors, detectives and spies are everywhere, while
the ignored pharmacist is nowhere to be seen.
To become a chemist is to choose a comfortable existence. At Boots they make around £38,000 on average. This money buys the kind of life the rich and the bohemian have always derided: the semi in suburbia with the spare room for the children; the annual holiday and the car on HP. It can sound dull until hard times fall on you or your society and you learn that ordinary achievements are not to be derided.
I wasn't surprised to learn that almost a fifth of pharmacists are Asian. It's a good career for second generation immigrants. Your parents work hard in a menial job or at a shop that's open all hours so that you can have better. You go to university and choose to study a subject that will bring you a secure middle-class future. Maybe a slightly dull future, but as your parents will tell you, there are worse fates than being bored occasionally.
The politicians chant that if you "work hard and play by the rules," they will respect you. But respect and security is hard to find in modern Britain even for such respectable people as pharmacists.
In 2007, Boots, once a solid Nottingham retailer, was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The American private equity firm specialises in borrowing money to take over established firms, and then sweats the assets and restructures the firm to pay off the debt and take the profits.
Wall Street journalists of the 1980s called KKR "the barbarians at the gate" . Others called them worse. No one has ever said that they were dull. In 2012 KKR and their partners more than trebled their original investment of around £1bn after selling 45% of their holding for £4.3bn. They sold out to and cashed in with the American health chain, Walgreens. It doesn't appear to like trade unions or to want to deal with them. More to the point it has an option to further enrich the "barbarians" of KKR by buying its remaining stake in Boots.,
Profit-taking on this scale has economic consequences which are all around us. Because corporations sit on piles of money, and direct profits to executives and shareholders, the balance between labour and capital is out of joint. Profits don't lead to higher wages or new jobs in developed countries, where in the words of the International Labour organisation, "Almost everywhere, young people and women find it difficult to obtain jobs that match their skills and aspirations." Falling real wages and persistently high unemployment mean that economic recovery is fuelled by yet more debt and may sputter out, as even George Osborne fears.
Less examined are the intellectual consequences of the power imbalance. The notion that employers exploit workers has a precarious place when established society hails the executive or the dealmaker as the real wealth creator. Workers do not create, so they cannot be exploited. They are cost centres to be squeezed, when they are not being patronised.
If this sounds like radical language, consider the position of an upright group of men and women. Boots' private equity owners are so jealous of their profits and contemptuous, arguably, of their workforce that pharmacists must seek a change in the very laws of the land to get the bosses to talk to them.
In 2012, the Pharmaceutical Defence Association asked Boots if it would recognise it as a trade union. This was a mild demand, indeed no demand at all. We still have free trade unions in this country and rights to association are still regarded as fundamental liberties, although you would be forgiven for not knowing it. Pharmacists need them as much as everyone else. They are caught in a trap, which is closing on many middle-class people.
On the one hand, the law treats them as professionals who are personally liable for mistakes in prescriptions and diagnoses. If a patient is given the wrong medicine and suffers, it is their responsibility. On the other, the conglomerates who employ them treat them as staff, "proletarians," if I may use old-fashioned language, who must obey orders, even though if a mistake happens because the corporation has not given pharmacists the backup they need, the pharmacist rather than conglomerate pays the price.
Boots strung the Pharmaceutical Defence Association along, then pulled a trick on it. Rather than recognise the independent trade union, it said it would deal with a Boots staff association instead. John Murphy, the general secretary of the rejected union and a former Boots chemist, said that the staff association didn't challenge the employer or seek to negotiate or bargain collectively.
The adjudicators of the Central Arbitration Committee, an independent body which settles disputes, did not bite their tongues. Boots "had no intention of recognising the union," they said. It stalled so it could arrange a deal with the staff association. As a result there was no real union at Boots which had "collective bargaining rights for at least pay, hours and holidays", it continued, and this omission left the private equity capitalists in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Boots went to the courts to challenge the decision. The courts said Boots did not have to recognise the Pharmaceutical Defence Association under English law but told the union that English law could well be incompatible with the European Convention.
The judge invited the union to go to another court to seek a "declaration of incompatibility". If a fresh judge makes a declaration, then the government must consider legislating to make English law and human rights law compatible. All this just so pharmacists can have the right to raise legitimate concerns with their vastly rich and proud employers.
The crisis that the soaring growth of inequalities of wealth and power has brought can be glimpsed everywhere. You can see it in the inability of the young to afford an ordinary house in an ordinary street. You can see it in the vast levels of debt weighing down on ordinary working- and middle-class families, and you can see it at the Boots pharmaceutical counter, where chemists are treated like red revolutionaries just for wanting to negotiate with their employer as free men and women.
To become a chemist is to choose a comfortable existence. At Boots they make around £38,000 on average. This money buys the kind of life the rich and the bohemian have always derided: the semi in suburbia with the spare room for the children; the annual holiday and the car on HP. It can sound dull until hard times fall on you or your society and you learn that ordinary achievements are not to be derided.
I wasn't surprised to learn that almost a fifth of pharmacists are Asian. It's a good career for second generation immigrants. Your parents work hard in a menial job or at a shop that's open all hours so that you can have better. You go to university and choose to study a subject that will bring you a secure middle-class future. Maybe a slightly dull future, but as your parents will tell you, there are worse fates than being bored occasionally.
The politicians chant that if you "work hard and play by the rules," they will respect you. But respect and security is hard to find in modern Britain even for such respectable people as pharmacists.
In 2007, Boots, once a solid Nottingham retailer, was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The American private equity firm specialises in borrowing money to take over established firms, and then sweats the assets and restructures the firm to pay off the debt and take the profits.
Wall Street journalists of the 1980s called KKR "the barbarians at the gate" . Others called them worse. No one has ever said that they were dull. In 2012 KKR and their partners more than trebled their original investment of around £1bn after selling 45% of their holding for £4.3bn. They sold out to and cashed in with the American health chain, Walgreens. It doesn't appear to like trade unions or to want to deal with them. More to the point it has an option to further enrich the "barbarians" of KKR by buying its remaining stake in Boots.,
Profit-taking on this scale has economic consequences which are all around us. Because corporations sit on piles of money, and direct profits to executives and shareholders, the balance between labour and capital is out of joint. Profits don't lead to higher wages or new jobs in developed countries, where in the words of the International Labour organisation, "Almost everywhere, young people and women find it difficult to obtain jobs that match their skills and aspirations." Falling real wages and persistently high unemployment mean that economic recovery is fuelled by yet more debt and may sputter out, as even George Osborne fears.
Less examined are the intellectual consequences of the power imbalance. The notion that employers exploit workers has a precarious place when established society hails the executive or the dealmaker as the real wealth creator. Workers do not create, so they cannot be exploited. They are cost centres to be squeezed, when they are not being patronised.
If this sounds like radical language, consider the position of an upright group of men and women. Boots' private equity owners are so jealous of their profits and contemptuous, arguably, of their workforce that pharmacists must seek a change in the very laws of the land to get the bosses to talk to them.
In 2012, the Pharmaceutical Defence Association asked Boots if it would recognise it as a trade union. This was a mild demand, indeed no demand at all. We still have free trade unions in this country and rights to association are still regarded as fundamental liberties, although you would be forgiven for not knowing it. Pharmacists need them as much as everyone else. They are caught in a trap, which is closing on many middle-class people.
On the one hand, the law treats them as professionals who are personally liable for mistakes in prescriptions and diagnoses. If a patient is given the wrong medicine and suffers, it is their responsibility. On the other, the conglomerates who employ them treat them as staff, "proletarians," if I may use old-fashioned language, who must obey orders, even though if a mistake happens because the corporation has not given pharmacists the backup they need, the pharmacist rather than conglomerate pays the price.
Boots strung the Pharmaceutical Defence Association along, then pulled a trick on it. Rather than recognise the independent trade union, it said it would deal with a Boots staff association instead. John Murphy, the general secretary of the rejected union and a former Boots chemist, said that the staff association didn't challenge the employer or seek to negotiate or bargain collectively.
The adjudicators of the Central Arbitration Committee, an independent body which settles disputes, did not bite their tongues. Boots "had no intention of recognising the union," they said. It stalled so it could arrange a deal with the staff association. As a result there was no real union at Boots which had "collective bargaining rights for at least pay, hours and holidays", it continued, and this omission left the private equity capitalists in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Boots went to the courts to challenge the decision. The courts said Boots did not have to recognise the Pharmaceutical Defence Association under English law but told the union that English law could well be incompatible with the European Convention.
The judge invited the union to go to another court to seek a "declaration of incompatibility". If a fresh judge makes a declaration, then the government must consider legislating to make English law and human rights law compatible. All this just so pharmacists can have the right to raise legitimate concerns with their vastly rich and proud employers.
The crisis that the soaring growth of inequalities of wealth and power has brought can be glimpsed everywhere. You can see it in the inability of the young to afford an ordinary house in an ordinary street. You can see it in the vast levels of debt weighing down on ordinary working- and middle-class families, and you can see it at the Boots pharmaceutical counter, where chemists are treated like red revolutionaries just for wanting to negotiate with their employer as free men and women.
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