Union Members Target AFL Web Printing’s Leading Customers

NEW YORK—March 21, 2012—Members of Local 1-L of the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters will take to the streets to educate major customers of AFL Web Printing about the company’s record of lawbreaking, serious safety violations and workers’ rights violations.

AFL’s elite customers include The Financial Times, the Village Voice, Women’s Wear Daily, Investor’s Business Daily, Daily Racing Form and other major publications.

Members of local will hand out leaflets in front of AFL customers The Financial Times’ and Women’s Wear Daily’s Manhattan headquarters, “exposing AFL’s illegal activity and calling on these customers to express their concern with AFL’s conduct and consider hiring a responsible printing company.”

In July 2011, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined AFL Web Printing $170,000 for serious and willful safety violations that put “its workers at risk of serious injury and possible death.”

According to the union, in January 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against AFL Web for illegally firing workers who tried to organize a union. These charges are pending. Workers voted to join GCC/IBT Local 1-L in 2010. To this day, they have been unable to reach a first contract due to AFL dragging its feet.

“We are going to take our message that AFL Web is bad for workers, bad for communities and bad for business right to the doorsteps of their major customers,” said Patrick LoPresti, president of GCC Local 1-L. “Venerable publications like the Financial Times and Women’s Wear Daily should not want to be associated with a company like AFL Web who has such a troubling record of illegal activity that harms workers and communities.”

The union has uncovered that AFL Web is a subsidiary of Westbury Partners, a Long Island-based private equity firm whose largest investor happens to be the U.S. Small Business Administration.

For more information, visit AFLWebExposed.org.

Source: GCC press release.