Check out an excerpt of the AFL-CIO's new Innovators website feature, "No Depression: Pharmaceutical-Labor Alliance Flourishes."

“I certainly admit going in with an attitude of let’s-see-what-this-is-about,” Johnson & Johnson Vice President Donald Bohn says about cooperating with labor unions. “It turns out we have a lot more in common than you might think.”

And that’s why, about four years ago, Johnson & Johnson joined the Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association (PILMA), a growing coalition of pharmaceutical industry giants and the major building trades unions. Its goal is to foster good jobs in the domestic pharmaceutical industry while increasing access to affordable medicines.

Such cooperation between workers and the industries that employ them is something of an anomaly in an era of increasingly balkanized politics.

One staple of PILMA’s program—along with conferences and other get-togethers—is to provide tours of union training facilities, which allow industry officials to see firsthand the skill levels and training union workers bring to the specialized construction needs of the biotechnology industry.

Read the rest of "No Depression: Pharmaceutical-Labor Alliance Flourishes."