Not All Pharma Sales Reps Happy with Novartis Overtime Decision

July 21st, 2010. By AbiK

When it comes to lawsuits that affect a lot of folks, there are always those who feel they’ve come out ahead, and those who don’t…

If you read some of the comments floating around online about the Novartis overtime pay ruling that happened a couple of weeks ago, you just might be surprised. Most of us automatically assume that when someone sues for overtime pay—and wins!—that everyone’s hopping around with glee and a sort of “yeah! screw them!” attitude about the offending employer.

Not so with Novartis.

But it’s not because anyone seems to have a lot of love for Novartis. No, the issue is more about the bigger picture—and the age-old question of “what’s in it for me?”.

Well, if you’re a “sales” representative at Novartis, the “what’s in it for me?” question may be answered with a “not much.” Seems this decision sort of makes you a bit of a non-entity in the scheme of things—ie, the scheme of things being labelled “sales”. What do you do? Do you sell? No. Do you work on the marketing plans—as in a more senior, independent decision-maker role? Uh, no. So you, therefore, don’t meet the outside sales or administrative exemptions for overtime pay—and gee whiz—you can get—and should’ve gotten—overtime pay!

Note, I said “non-entity”. That’s not meant as a low blow here. The fact of the matter is that these pharma sales reps basically go and grease the skids for the “real” sales reps to come in and close the deal. So they promote (pre-promote?) Novartis’ drugs so that a sales person can then follow up and make the sale—making the outside sales exemption more or less null and void.

And to explain the administrative exemption piece of this a bit more, dailyfinance.com offers this:

The Court determined, however, that because the Reps play no role in: (1) planning Novartis’ marketing strategy; (2) formulating the “pre-scripted core messages” they must deliver to physicians; and are required to: (a) visit a given physician a certain number of times per trimester; (b) promote a given drug a certain number of times per semester; and (c) hold a designated number of promotional events ordered by Novartis, the “four freedoms” advanced by Novartis did not show the Reps sufficiently exercised either discretion or independent judgment as required by the administrative exemption.

So step back a minute. What does this mean bigger picture? Well, according to some posters over at cafepharma.com, what it means is not necessarily good and a sort of foreboding for pharma industry “sales” reps in general.

Some posters indicate that between the fact that most of the sales volume is from managed care organizations and that, now, with the ability to send doctors information on-the-fly via emails, webinars, downloadable pdf’s…well, it starts to put into question the role of the middle guy who merely stokes the relationship with the doctors.

Other posters focus on what this will mean for the day-to-day duties of the “sales’ reps—now they’ll technically be “on the clock” and wouldn’t that mean clocking in and out—perhaps multiple times each day based on what they’re doing at each given moment?

There are certainly some reps who commented that they are happy to finally get their due—one mentions having worked on a drug launch that would at times eat up 80 hours a week—and surely anyone can understand wanting some fair compensation for such.

What will remain to be seen now is what happens to the role of the pharma sales rep? Novartis knows they could be racking up some big-time overtime expense—and on the flip side, some pharma sales reps may not be too keen on what being classified as a non-exempt employee really means for the day-to-day. So stay tuned…

Tags: Novartis, Overtime Pay, Pharma Sales Rep

This was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Emerging Issues, Employment . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.