A major loss of brain power
August 22nd 2011 03:01
Maybe the 15 women chatting over coffee at the Wegmans supermarket cafe in Malvern should start their own pharmaceutical firm.
They have the brain power, if not the capital.
A scientist who spent 19 years in drug development sat a few tables away from a coordinator of clinical trials.
A few managed pharmaceutical finances, and one administered a $2.7 billion global research and development budget. One handled drug pricing and another edited marketing materials. The former human resources person squeezed in next to the woman who once worked in supply logistics.
Average annual salary: at least $100,000. Total pay in the group: about $1.5 million.
But not now.
Not one holds a full-time job in her field - all have been laid off, part of the huge brain drain in what has been one of this region's key industries.
"It's tragic. It's a colossal waste of what we could be contributing," said Robyn Allen-McKinnon, at Wegmans earlier this month, part of a group that meets every other Monday, including tomorrow in King of Prussia.
Allen-McKinnon has been out of work for a year, despite two master's degrees and 20 years of experience in operations and in negotiating drug prices with insurers.
The reasons are many, recruiters for the pharma industry say.
"What's happened in the last five years is a complete implosion," said recruiter Cheryl Buxton, who leads the pharmaceutical practice out of the executive-search company Korn/Ferry International's Princeton office.
Some, she said, are related to changes in the pharmaceutical-product mix, some related to the way big pharma companies organize their workforces.
To cope with projected revenue declines and margin erosion as some blockbuster drugs went off their patents, companies consolidated, among them the 2009 Pfizer Inc. acquisition of Wyeth. Those consolidations, in turn, led to people such as Allen-McKinnon being out of work.
"I think it's a tragedy," Buxton said. "I think we're losing so much expertise."
Four of the 15 at Wegmans on Aug. 8 lost their jobs in the Pfizer consolidation.
"We are such high-achievers," Allen-McKinnon said. "We expect to be doing something and making contributions. We chose this area because we wanted to make a difference in people's lives."
"In pharmaceuticals, they are not laying off 500 people here and there," said Alma Azua-Cassady, who worked in health-care marketing until she lost her job at AstraZeneca P.L.C. in December 2008.
"They are laying off 12,000 people at a time," she said.
AstraZeneca, with facilities in Wilmington, kept piling on the cuts, enough to bring them to a planned 15,000 worldwide by the end of 2013. Pfizer slashed 19,000 jobs after it acquired Wyeth, with many at Wyeth's Collegeville location losing work.
In July, Merck & Co. Inc. said it would cut as many as 13,000 jobs by 2015 - that's on top of 11,500 jobs lost in 2010.
"We're very aware that the pharmaceutical industry is shrinking," said Allen-McKinnon of Plymouth Meeting.
She and most of the others have had interviews but, so far, no jobs.
There are many ways to count what society as a whole loses when people are out of work, and one of them is the multiplier effect. That is a term economists use to measure the ripple effect of each dollar as it moves through the economy.
Statewide, said Rutgers University professor Michael Lahr, who has studied the economic effect of pharmaceutical companies, each spent salary dollar adds roughly $1.50 to the economy.
Doing the math, that is $2.25 million worth of spending being curtailed with the loss of those 15 jobs. An example? Allen-McKinnon and her husband own two cars, each with more than 100,000 miles.
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