Printers take protest to advertising giants as newspaper lockout rolls on

The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union is taking a campaign of action over Seven West Media’s worker lockout to the company’s biggest advertisers, with a protest this afternoon to engage JB Hi-Fi and The Good Guys.
The action comes as members at SWM remain locked out indefinitely, after once again voting down a proposed Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, which would slash workers’ terms and conditions.
AMWU WA state secretary Steve McCartney told Liam Bartlett on 6PR Mornings management locked out 102 printers of The West Australian on Friday February 4 after they refused to give up the safety net of a redundancy payout, or accept pay cuts from SWM, which posted a record $318 million profit last year, mostly due to advertising from Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys and Bunnings.
“Now they’ve locked the workers who print the newspaper out of the workplace because they’re asking for a fair deal,” Mr McCartney told Bartlett.
“It’s a bit of a disgrace really.
“The first thing we tried to do was get onto Kerry Stokes and say, ‘could you roll your sleeves up, come back down here and get management to negotiate in good faith.
“Well that was completely ignored by the Seven West group.”
Tap PLAY below to hear more on the stand-off and negotiations.