B&T staff redundant as contract dispute ends in closure

All 287 staff at Butler and Tanner (B&T) were made redundant on Saturday morning and the troubled book printer is due to be placed into receivership.

Staff were informed by a letter which arrived on Saturday that the company was closed with immediate effect, they had been made redundant and that an application to place the company into receivership would be made this week.

The news comes just days after Mike Dolan, chairman of B&T's owner Media & Print Investments (MPI), threatened to close the company if staff went on strike next Wednesday.

The strike was due to take place over a bitter dispute regarding proposed changes to working practices at the firm, which MPI bought in a pre-pack deal in August last year.

Unite, the union, said in a statement that workers were owed "thousands of pounds" in unpaid wages and deducted pension contributions.
In the statement, national officer Ann Field condemned the closure of the factory as a "despicable act".

She said: "Unite will be demanding recompense in full from the perpetrators of this despicable act, sacrificing people's jobs and livelihoods.

"Mike Dolan and former boss Andrew Hillman should be called to account for what they have done to the workers' jobs, their pensions and their community."

The closure came as a shock to workers, who, according to Unite, arrived at the factory today to find its gates locked shut.

PrintWeek was unable to contact Dolan on Saturday. However, he was quoted by the BBC as saying that shareholders in MPI had decided to pull funding in the firm because the union had not backed down over the planned strike.

He said: "Shareholders were unwilling to pour good money down what they consider to be a drain and they declined to make further funding available.

"Their [the union's] miscalculation has cost 300 people their jobs and sadly, 100 of those people were not even in the union.

"The union has shown utter contempt for its own members and B&T by unnecessarily publicising their strike threat in a crass attempt to exert pressure on the company.

"That was an act of wilful economic vandalism which frightened off too many of our customers, suppliers and financiers."

The decision to close the business is understood to have come on Friday afternoon following negotiations between the union and MPI and conducted with conciliation service ACAS. The union claimed that during those talks it received no notification that the company would be closed the following day.

A meeting of union members is planned for Tuesday.
Source: printweek