Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

And you wouldn't believe how intense these disputes can get!

Hotcards is a union printer. All our employees are members of Graphic Communications Union Local 546. As a union printer, we do a lot of political printing for campaigns that support unions, and we print for unions and unionized business, nonprofits, and other organizations that rely heavily on print promotion.

One of the great things about being a unionized print shop is the sense of community and value placed on the employee, which we believe results in the highest possible quality product for our customers. Almost ever since the printing industry existed, unions have been an important part of it.

But the term 'printing industry' gets thrown around a lot, as if everyone involved in putting ink on paper is at sea in the same rocking boat. Which is simply not the case. Digital printers are not in the same boat as offset printers. Textbook printers are not in the same boat as trade paperback printers. Marketing service providers are not the same as silkscreeners. And as is becoming increasingly clear, newspaper printers are not in the same boat as commercial printers.

Although we represent two strongly union-centric sectors of the diverse print community, newspaper printers and commercial printers have been placed increasingly at odds over the last few years. Cost-cutting measures by struggling publications have led to newspapers shutting down print operations and outsourcing their printing work to commercial printing shops.

Not surprisingly, the trend doesn't sit too well with newspaper printer unions. In France, free daily paper Direct Matin recently made the move over to a commercial printer, inciting an intense strike at the paper's former printing plant. Strikers have even been stealing and destroying thousands of copies of the paper in protest of the move.

In France, the feeling on the newspaper trade union side of things is that jobs are being lost to commercial printers who are not unionized and are therefore able to offer significantly lower rates to newspaper publishers. Interestingly, according to the folks over at Newspaper Innovation, the French media is nervous about reporting on the subject because it could lead to countrywide newspaper union strikes.

Over the last few years, similar problems have been arising in the U.S. And not only between newspaper print unions and nonunion commercial printers. Could a move that helps one segment of the print industry hurt another? And if so, what are the alternatives? Weigh in, readers!