HELENA - Three years ago, pharmacy technicians and clerks at a now-closed Snyders drugstore in Helena finally decided they had had enough and formed a union.

"We were trying to improve the conditions and the wages," said Sandi Curriero Luckey, a licensed pharmacy technician. "We tried repeatedly to work with management to improve things."

Turnover was high. Whenever a technician advanced on the wage scale and was due a raise, she said, managers would say the company couldn't afford it and would promise one later.

"So the next time, they would say we're not using that schedule now," Luckey said. "It was stall tactic, stall tactic, stall tactic."

After surveying what all Helena pharmacies paid their staffs, employees of this chain drugstore learned they worked for one of the two lowest-paying drugstores. A nearby pharmacy paid $3-$6 an hour more for the same jobs, she said.

"We presented it to management," Luckey said. "He said we'll give you 50 cents an hour more. We were cooperative. They said it would be on our next paychecks."

The raises never showed up.

"We had bent over backwards," Luckey said. "We said we can't do it on our own. We need a union."

All seven pharmacy technicians and clerks signed union authorization cards.

"Once we said the word 'union,' everything changed," Luckey said. "They started coming out with work policies we couldn't comply with. They took us into closed-door (one-on-one) sessions. We wanted to do it in a group. A corporate officer flew in. He was concerned about the money the union would take from me. I said I would be fine."

Employees voted to form a union in February 2006. Obtaining a contract took nearly nine months, Luckey said. Afterward, some employees saw their pay jump by $4 an hour.

"Before, we were just used and abused," she said. "Afterward, you could actually see them slowly start to respect us. That was probably bigger than the struggle to survive on the wages. It became a healthy environment."

Unless the Employee Free Choice Act passes, "employers will continue to do what they did at the pharmacy: take us in, intimidate us and scare us," Luckey said.

She quit the pharmacy for a job at the Montana AFL-CIO. The pharmacy eventually closed.