Medicines in the hands of qualified health professionals offer the most effective means of alleviating diseases. In the pharmaceutical sector, several factors contribute to the successful production of medicines among them, the cost of labor. Currently, the growth of labor in this sector is not a steady one: cost challenges are emerging yearly and today, the reality is that labor costs are excessively high. Considering the pivotal role played by labor in pharmaceutical production, there is a need for the sector to adopt new measures that will enable it to cope with the high labor demands of the industry. This paper concisely looks into the labor situation in the pharmaceutical sector by a) discussing some of the drivers of labor costs, b) identifying the remediation to these drivers, and c) weighing the future of the remediation practices.
The first driver for high labor costs is the work environment and compensation. The production of pharmaceutical products is science-based and research-oriented. The workers in this environment engage in mass-production of medicines involving large-scale operations under the strict control of quality and purity of the products (Erixon & Van der Marel, 2011). The nature of these operations suggests that workers have to do more than 8 hours per shift and an average of more than 45-hour workweeks (Erixon & Van der Marel, 2011). Sometimes the shifts run round the clock. Sustaining such extended working hours of output requires high wages, hence the current high labor costs.
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Secondly, there are shortages of skilled workforce to who can deliver quality products under the stringent conditions discussed above. Errors in the work of pharmaceutical production lead to wastage of resources and time spent on rework. To prevent this, the firms pay more to secure the handful of the available personnel skilled enough for the tasks.
The third factor driving the costs is the external labor spillovers. Different cost regulations in different countries affect the availability of domestic labor. Foreign pharmaceutical firms paying more wages on similar job opportunities to the ones offered domestically often attract the available skilled personnel, forcing the local pharmaceutical sector to adjust to the labor costs in the parallel markets.
In response, pharmaceutical firms have resorted to the mechanization of labor to cut on the wage demands from employees (World Health Organization, 2011). Machines are expensive to deploy, but in the long run, they cost less to maintain and facilitate rapid production. The advancements in technology, therefore, come in handy as remediation for the costly human production of drugs. The mechanization of labor also helps in keeping up with labor shortages. This is because instead of paying highly to retain the available skilled personnel, the firms are paying less to train semi-skilled graduates to take up operational roles of the machines (Light & Lexchin, 2012). However, the factor of external spillovers remains pertinently unsolved for most pharmaceutical firms.
As it stands, pharmaceutical production has switched to technology as the primary means to cope with the escalated labor costs. In retrospect, the global population has been rising quite rapidly indicating that this venture does hold a promising future. With the current rate of population rise, the number of people with unmet medical needs is also expected to grow thanks to lifestyle changes. Even without technology, human labor would be too slow to suffice the exponential rise in the future demands for medicine hence technology remains the best option. The only concern is about the technology applied today: whether it will be scalable enough to double production of drugs at sustainable costs or not. The future of labor costs of pharmaceutical production remains indefinite.
References
Erixon, F., & Van der Marel, E. (2011). What is driving the rise in health care expenditures? An inquiry into the nature and causes of the cost disease (No. 05/2011). ECIPE working paper.
Light, D. W., & Lexchin, J. R. (2012). Pharmaceutical research and development: what do we get for all that money?. Bmj , 345 , e4348.
World Health Organization. (2011). Pharmaceutical production and related technology transfer: landscape report.
