I had a chat with a mate today in the commercial printing business & queried him as to AJ’s version as to the “lockout letters”.
First of all he looked at previous letters from the company. He noted they were addressed with the individuals name & mailing address. They also included a bar code & in some instance a staff number. The quality of the print appeared very good, that being a commercial standard. In previous instances correspondence was also in an envelope that was printed with the individual name & address on it.
This style of letter would have been produced externally & he stated that with his experience in the industry would probably take 3 to 4 days to produce & mail out. That is, if a printing slot was immediately available to do the print run.
Keeping in mind there were approximately 9000 AIPA, ALAEA & TWU members to receive these letters & a commercial printer generating 180 pages per minute & including the automatic fold function into a “DL” or two fold format to fit into a standard envelope.
The standard 3 to 4 days would need some extra time to print the material & in the “lockout” letter case, print the stickers with names & addresses on them. Then send the material to a mail house, where the 30 plus workers would then place the stickers on the envelopes, place the letters in the envelopes then sort the mail ready to be sent to couriers around the country. The sorting process per geographical location would take a significant amount of time.
Keep in mind the letters would then leave the mail house & be sent to couriers all around the nation with the associated travel time to get there. Then the couriers would need to collect the said mail & start their delivery run.
So in his opinion 3 to 4 days minimum, if all was going well & using external commercial hired help.
Compare this to the AJ story of the lockout letters, after authorizing the print & mail out mid morning on Saturday 29th Oct for delivery the next day (a Sunday)
My mate stated the print quality in the case of my letter was average. Not something that he would expect from a commercial printer. There was no name or address on it, nor staff number or barcode. It raised his eyebrows because it was different to previous company correspondence. No, printed name & address on the envelope (just a sticker), again different to previous correspondence.
In his opinion it looked like the printing of the letters & the mail house functions may have been done in house. That being photocopies of a standard letter, then a print run of the address labels. He knows people in the industry & he reckons the best copiers QF would have would probably only do about 120 letters per minute & wasn’t sure whether they had the automatic fold capability. It would then take considerable time to then fold the letters (if required), place them in an envelope, stick the name & address label on the front. Then sort the mail by location ready for distribution to the couriers.
The conclusion he draw from this is because of the time frame taken to use external contractors plus possible leaks to the public of the impending lockout. The print & mail house functions would have been likely to be done in house & would have taken a lot of time to do.
We discussed why would some people get lockout letters & others not?
He stated, when companies try to do print runs like this in house, they’ll make mistakes.
Sound familiar? Some staff getting no lockout letters, other staff getting return to work letters sent to pilots with letters inside referencing an engineering EBA.
If I was AJ & an external company was contracted to do my legally required print run & mail out & the above happened, I’d want my money back!!
My mate went on further to say that there would be a trail of evidence after a 9000 letter print run. If it was printed externally, he said large commercial printers would be attached to a computer. There would be evidence of the document sent to the printer & the computer keeps records of the print run to ensure accurate billing, referencing the date, time & amount of pages. If it was a copier & done in house a technician could access the copier & view the print jobs & look at date, time of printing & number of pages.
MC