RR Donnelley to close, with loss of 200 jobs

Flaxby-based telephone directory printer RR Donnelley, which counts the Yellow Pages as one of its most famous customers, is set to close at the end of the year with a "devastating" loss of about 200 jobs, Unite the union said.

The company is headquartered in America, and despite calls and emails by The Press to its Chicago head office, has failed to comment on the news.

Unite representatives say they are due to have talks with Donnelley management in a bid to secure as many jobs as possible and to ascertain the causes for the closure.

Donnelley had operated out of a site in Boroughbridge Road until 2001 when it moved to Flaxby. A series of redundancies were than made over the following decade.

Unite regional officer Chris Daly said: "This is a bitter blow for the workforce and their families as well as the local economy. These are well-paid jobs that are under threat and won’t be easily replicated in rural North Yorkshire.

"We are due to have a meeting with the management next week – the day has yet to be confirmed – with a view to securing the best deal possible for our members. Obviously, we would like to secure all the jobs under threat.

"The company prints telephone directories for the UK and foreign markets. It had moved into other markets and has been printing Avon for a number of years. We are not sure at this stage what has precipitated the closure announcement.

"This is an American-owned company and one of the avenues we will be discussing is redeployment to another of its sites in the UK.

"We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to support our members at what is a traumatic time for them."

The most recent job cuts at Donnelley came in January 2009, when the firm announced it was shedding 25 jobs following what Unite claimed was a continuous fall in orders.

Staff were hit twice in 2007, when in February The Press revealed how 35 jobs were being axed, and several months later it emerged the printer was making 110 staff - about a third of the workforce - redundant after losing two major contracts.

The newspaper reported that, while the company's Yellow Pages contact, which dated back to the 1930's, was still in place, sources were saying it had recently lost contracts to print both the Thomson Directory and also a Dutch telephone directory.

The Press mounted a successful campaign in the 1990s to keep RR Donnelley jobs in the area, after it emerged it was planning to close down its then factory in Boroughbridge Road, York. A petition signed by 3,200 readers was taken to the company's headquarters in Chicago by the newspaper's then business editor, Jeff Newton.

The company was considering opening up a new factory elsewhere, but eventually opted to build it on the site of a former Samsung factory at Flaxby Moor, situated on the A59 near its junction with the A1.

It made the move out of York at the turn of the Millennium. The majority of its staff, who were mainly from York, opted to stay with the firm and commute.