Harrisburg, Pa. — A group of pharmacy industry workers in Pennsylvania facing layoffs want President Trump to intervene.
“Save our jobs,” Jackie Dixon and a chorus of other employees at Express Scripts said in the hallway outside Trump’s 100-day rally.
Express Scripts, a Fortune 100 prescription delivery company, plans to close a local facility that employs about 200 workers. Express lost a contract that accounted for about a third of its annual earnings, but the endangered employees cited the company’s profits last year — $3.4 billion, the Service Employee International Union emphasized in a recent publication — as evidence that they’re victims of corporate greed.
“[W]orkers should not have the rug pulled out from under them and have their jobs sent overseas,” they wrote in a letter to Trump, hand-signed by about 100 workers. “Please meet with us and say you support our right to stand together and that you will prevent a single one of us from losing our job. Specifically, we are asking you to issue an executive order that would prevent any company from moving jobs abroad.”
Such an order is likely beyond Trump’s authority, but his public intervention against Ford and Carrier has the workers hoping he can do something. “Call Express Scripts,” Dixon said. “Lobby on our behalf.”
More layoffs could be coming, however, as Express Scripts stock value plunged after they lost a major contract, even raising the possibility that the company will be bought out. “Post the bludgeoning, we think management will have to take a hard look at the company’s prospects through the roll-off and decide the path forward … that is likely to maximize value creation,” Evercore ISI analyst Ross Muken wrote in a memo quoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
That doesn’t bode well for the workers. “We put out letters, and we didn’t really hear back, so we’re here,” Dixon said.
