SINGAPORE: A netizen online has questioned whether SPH Media staff recently featured for “keeping print alive” in the city-state were among those affected by fresh retrenchments announced by SPH Media on Tuesday evening (July 22).
“Not sure whether any of those staff being celebrated earlier on were retrenched by SPH,” the user wrote on r/singapore. Another commenter said, “Ouch… Just one week apart… does not look good.”
On Tuesday, SPH Media chief executive Chan Yeng Kit announced in an internal e-mail that 11 production workers would be laid off. The affected staff had been operating two of the company’s six printing presses, as well as handling newspaper distribution duties, The Straits Times reported.
The cuts follow the decommissioning of two 30-year-old Colorliner printing presses, which the company said had reached the end of their operational lifespan. These were made by Manroland Goss Web Systems and were first used in 1996.
Printing operations are being shifted to the four remaining Commander presses from Koenig & Bauer, which were deployed in 2003. These newer machines can print up to 56 broadsheet colour pages and produce up to 72,000 copies per hour.
An SPH Media spokeswoman told The Straits Times that the changes allow the company to “maintain quality printing operations and improve process efficiency.”
“Regrettably, the changes have also resulted in redundancies across 11 job roles in SPH Media’s production division,” she added.
She also noted that the company explored redeployment opportunities but found no suitable placements for the affected workers.
Just last week, The Straits Times featured several decades-long serving staff behind what’s “keeping print alive” in Singapore.
The featured employees included 60-year-old Abdul Razak, who joined the pre-press team over three decades ago and now works as a senior pre-press specialist; 56-year-old production manager Sumithy Kamalakaran; 64-year-old senior production manager Phua Kia Wah; 63-year-old assistant production manager Suhaimi Hamzah; and 55-year-old printing line chief Low Kok Siong, among others. /TISG
