Jobs Can Be Back-Breaking for Newspaper Mailers

Computerization and digital technology has transformed the newspaper business over the past 30 years, most notably in newsrooms. Yet work in newspaper printing plants continues to be strenuous, repetitive, and back-breaking. Printing presses have undergone major modernization, but it still takes workers to feed, load, stack, and palletize news sections and inserts.

The 200 members of the Chicago Mailers union, ITU-CWA Local 2, handle more than 23 million advertising inserts each week at the Chicago Sun-Times. Each packet of inserts (Parade magazine, ads from Home Depot, Wallgreens, Toys R Us and dozens of others) get hand-inserted.

For two hours at a stretch, a worker picks a packet up from a skid, bounces the inserts on a table to even them out, and slips them into a pocket in an inserting machine. Workers insert some 15,000-17,000 pieces each hour.

"Injuries to the wrist, back, and knees are pretty common," says Bob Maida, president of the local. "All the bending down, turning around, lifting and inserting motions takes a toll." For some, carpel tunnel surgery is necessary.

The union has been instrumental in altering aspects of the job so the successive number of repetitive motions has been reduced. "We had to fight like dogs to convince the company that we needed to move around the machine every 15 minutes," said Maida.

Despite modernization, ergonomic design considerations are sometimes left out of the equation. Mailers at the Washington Post's printing plant in Springfield, Va., have had numerous hand injuries since the company installed new ROP (Run of the Press) equipment this summer. The machine has a conveyor belt where bundles of completed news sections roll off to be palletized, but openings between the rollers on the conveyor belt are wider than on the old equipment, making it much easier for workers to accidentally catch their hands, often causing serious injuries. The new conveyor is also shorter, giving the workers less time to pull off bad bundles.

"If there's a bundle that needs to be pulled, the shorter belt doesn't give us much time to react and things begin to back up quickly," says Mark Pullium, president of Washington Mailers Local 29. The workers handle up to 60,000 papers an hour. Some 400 mailers and helpers work at the facility.

On several occasions the union has called in OSHA because of safety violations with machines or with heavy rolling stock equipment (electric jacks, fork trucks, and Deep Reaches, which are four-story high fork lifts). A straight-line-sorter was taken out of service for months because the Post was required to install safety guards on the inserting machine.

The workers make a joke of the amount of improperly working equipment — "That's what we call "RTB," says Pullium, "run till it breaks."

In terms of safety, Pullium thinks the industry seems to be going backwards. "Our presses are running faster, the conveyors are shorter, but they want us to put together a newspaper with fewer workers," he said. "This is why we need a union."