Ageing blues

The Federal Budget is coming up and plenty of ideas are being run up the flagpole. One that is going to have a real effect on our people is the proposal to raise the retirement age to seventy.

Printing is a physical game and whether you operate a GTO or a long perfector, at some point you are going to have to handle serious paper. It's nothing when you're sixteen, fun when you’re twenty-five, a good alternative to cycling when you’re thirty, tiresome at forty and pretty bloody hard at fifty. At sixty? That's why you retire. But doing it at seventy?

I'm third generation print. My grandfather was a letterpressman who when well into his seventies would come in to the shop to help my father out. He would run the Thomson, watch the Davidson and help with table work, but he drew the line at any serious paper handling. He had been lifting tons of paper since he was fourteen and his body just couldn't handle it any more.

[Related: ProPrint's budget coverage]

In many similar trades, it would be unusual for older tradesmen to still be on the tools. In the old days if you had a good press operator you might promote him into sales to try and help him along and put his shop floor expertise to work for your customers. But the lack of apprentices coming through means if you have a good press operator, you need to keep him operating that press. The printing factory has become the domain of middle aged blokes and new migrants – and they’re not going anywhere.

You might not care – after all if you are reading this magazine, you are likely working a desk job and have moved off the floor or have your own business. But try to think about those times that you have had to jump on the guillotine or do a big delivery because your guy is away. It hurts, and chances are the guy you’re paying to do that job is middle aged and hurting too. And try to picture you both doing it when you are sixty seven, not because you want to but because you have to.

Is there a solution? Paper’s not going to get any lighter and paper handling equipment goes only so far. And some things you just can’t do anything about. We once had WorkCover come through our shop and demand we redesign our GTO46 to make the paper come out of the top so the operator wouldn’t have to bend down to check his sheets. They backed off once we showed them the problems associated with their request, but they had a point – a press operator is doing a lot of very repetitive physical activity even if he never goes near a guillotine.

A few years ago a printer who had worked for my family for close to twenty years had to have a few days off after hurting his back on the weekend. He was in his late fifties and I asked him if he had thought of retiring before his back was totally gone. But he had to keep working. Life had been tough on him financially and at his age he was close to a decade away from getting the pension. His only choice was to keep going, regardless of any risk to his long term health.

He’s isn’t the only one in this position in printing. If this proposal gets through, many of our people are going to have to push on when they are physically unable to, or at the least at the cost of making their lives miserable.

They can always get other jobs I suppose. Ones with no heavy lifting that you can learn in your sixties. Not many of those in printing. Anyone who’s eaten in a fast food joint in America knows where those jobs are though. Plenty of tables to clean and floors to mop there and the elderly are welcome to the night shift. But does that sound like the way you want to finish your printing career?

Still, this is just a proposal – maybe it won’t happen and I’m worrying over nothing. But if it does make the final budget I hope PIAA and the union fights it together. Getting an extra five years out of your staff/tax payer might make sense on paper, but when it’s at the cost of making every blue collar worker’s life a misery none of us should stand for it.

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