About one hundred printers will be out of a job on Saturday after the final edition of The Sunday Times rolls through the presses at News Corp’s Perth Print.
The ACCC in September gave the go-ahead for Seven West Media, which owns The West Australian newspaper, to purchase The Sunday Times and its website Perth Now from rival News Corp. The paper will now be printed at the West Australian Newspapers facility at Osborne Park.
The Perth Print site at Canning Vale, which includes three manroland Geoman presses and Ferag mailroom equipment dating to 1990, is being decommissioned.
Dozens of veteran newspaper printers and print workers will be lost to the industry, says Alan Lindsey, print secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) in WA.
“It’s come as a shock to them and it’s very disappointing that a government agency like the ACCC has allowed this acquisition to go ahead. About 46 full-time staff and 60 casuals will be out of work - most of them are printers or worked in distribution and packaging - and another 50 administrative staff and journalists from the MEAA have also lost their jobs.
"The last edition of the Sunday Times will go to press this Saturday night and roll out on Sunday morning then all the work will be transferred over to Seven West Media.
"A handful of print workers are being kept on for another week to help decommission the presses and get the site ready for sale. We're told that they're planning on scraping most of the equipment but they'll keep some of the rollers."
Perth Print had been a unionised workplace for a long time and the sacked workers have 'decent' redundancy provisions, according to the AMWU's Tom Palmer.
“Many of our members are highly-skilled, veteran newspaper printers who have never worked on smaller digital presses and most of them will be lost to the industry," says Lindsey. "A lot of them have been at Perth Print since 1995 when it started. Some of them are older blokes but many are in their 30s and 40s. They have a very, very slim chance of finding similar work. There are no positions available in Perth and there’s nothing with News Corp on the east coast. PMP is struggling and the only real competitor here in Perth was Seven West Media and obviously they don’t need employees."
Lindsey spoke shortly before leaving for a mass meeting of sacked workers at Canning Vale.
“We’re trying to advise people about their best options but it’s a difficult situation. These are people who believed they would be taken care of by the company. It was implied that there would be jobs for them. They're proud people and proud printers and they are very disappointed.”