And they want the government to help them. The reps have a union, Federisf, which has asked the government to cut the prices paid to drugmakers that have significantly cut back on the number of reps in their sales networks by shifting employees to outsourcing firms, APM Europe reports.

The reps accuse drugmakers of taking advantage of labor reforms to transfer groups of reps at very little cost. According to rules introduced in 2003, part of a company can be transferred to another owner if it is already an autonomous unit. Several drugmakers, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Merck, have used the law to transfer reps to contract services companies.

Federisf claims that the law isn’t meant to cover such transfers and notes that almost all the companies which have done so are parts of “multinational pharmaceutical groups with headquarters outside Italy.” The union asked that investment and research incentives not be granted to the drugmakers that have cut signifnicant numbers of reps and pharmavigilance services. And Federisf also requested that “the price of the drugs of theses companies be cut in proportion with the amount that they have reduced their fixed costs so that illicit profiting can be avoided.”

Federisf fears that one in three rep jobs could eventually be lost, and the the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, recently estimated that up to 10,000 rep positions could be at risk in Italy.