Is Long-Term Unemployment An Issue For Pharma?

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

As we slipped into the booth at the local diner, it occurred to me that the last time I had spoken to Glen was at this same venue. “Yeah, that was two years ago,” he said with a tinge of nostalgia. Two years ago? Time had flown by for me but I know it was not the case for him. Glen still had not found a new full-time position.

A Ph.D. scientist (organic chemistry) with solid people skills and senior management experience, I was surprised when he got down-sized. I was just as sure he would end up in a good place in the long-run. Unfortunately, the long-run never came. After pursuing “more than 100 legitimate job leads and conversations throughout the pharmaceutical industry,” Glen is still looking for a new job. And just like that, I found myself sitting face-to-face with the long-term unemployment epidemic that is afflicting many individuals in the U.S., as well as scientists and pharmaceutical employees from around the world.

“I could work in Lowe’s or Home Depot (two U.S. hardware and do-it-yourself chains) with other scientists,” he said. Instead, although still quite some time to retirement, he will burn as little of his pension and savings as possible until he can collect social security. In the meantime, he and his wife are putting their home up for sale.

This article isn’t a social conscience piece. It is, though, a reminder of the changes to the pharmaceutical industry brought on by recent business strategies, their resultant tactics and implementation, the role contract research, development and manufacturing has played within the trends, and more largely the world economy and national healthcare policies.

Included in a piece written for Chimica Oggi (Chemistry Today) that will come out in May, is a thought process around whether a fair share of the scientists who have been forced out of pharma’s labs won’t simply end up in the labs of CROs/CMOs. But an irony here is that Glen was let go by a global provider’s facilities in the U.S., not by a pharmaceutical company. Of course there are many individuals facing a similar scenario on the pharma side as well.

Talk of the opposite occurring in some quarters notwithstanding, for the most part job growth in our industry remains in China and India, not in the West. Perhaps we should add “yet” to the end of that sentence, since it appears some equilibrium is indeed working its way around the globe, with some increasing opportunities in the U.S. and Europe as well. There was news to this affect recently when Covance announced it was responding to an increase in demand by planning to add about 100 jobs to a large-molecule laboratory in Indiana. The company also believes it will continue to expand its biologics development capacity over the next five years. Covance said it expects this investment in bioanalytic expertise will increase its small-molecule development work as well.

This is what Glen and many other scientists need to hear. Until now, Glen, who has completed extensive international assignments for his employers in the past, including in India, says he could leave the U.S. if he took a job there. A move to India is a tough decision and one his wife is not up for, despite the serious circumstances the two of them currently face.  

You’d be hard pressed to find an industry more global in nature than the current CRO/CMO industry that supports pharma and bio companies. Thousands of former employees faced tough decisions and changing circumstances as we left 2013 in the past and now anxiously head into the second quarter of 2014. This is a good time to pause and take a look around at the state of the industry.

The management guru Peter Druker said that the third task of management[1] is handling the social impacts and the social responsibilities of the enterprise, but that “(b)usiness exists to supply goods and services to customers, rather than to supply jobs to workers and managers, or even dividends to stockholders. The hospital does not exist for the sake of doctors and nurses, but for the sake of patients whose one and only desire is to leave the hospital cured and never come back…” Interesting for us, he selected the healthcare industry as his example.

A pharmaceutical company, because of the very public nature of its business and the importance of its products to the human condition, needs to run a successful and profitable (and in most cases very large, global and complex) business. It must also realize that the outcome its products will have on consumers has to be its most important aspect. But what of its employees – in most cases highly competent scientists and engineers?  

“To discharge its job, to produce economic goods and services, the business enterprise has to have impact on people, on communities, and on society. It has to have power and authority over people, e.g., employees, whose own ends and purposes are not defined by and within the enterprise. It has to have an impact on the community as a neighbor, as the source of jobs and tax revenues….And increasingly…concern for the quality of life, that is, for the physical, human, and social environment of modern man and modern community.” [2] I don’t know that Drucker consulted to the pharma industry specifically, but he certainly could have judging from how close to home his advice and examples land. While working for a CRO/CMO, I remember on occasion an uneasy feeling regarding the relatively small amount of time I spent thinking about the real end goal of the services we provided – increasing outcomes for the healthcare patient. To go along with that, we now have a lot of Glens to think about as well.

As for Glen, you would think at this point he would not be too interested in what Drucker has to say (and even less interested in what I have to say). But Glen is not bitter. Before we parted ways he was circumspect and understands (clearer than many) just how dynamic the pharmaceutical industry is, and the impact that has on workers – on both the sponsor and provider sides of the business. Before we drained our final cups of coffee, Glen spoke of a few more conversations he was having…and perhaps chasing a couple more leads.

Let’s take the time to consider Glen and others out there like him as we move to the heart of 2014.