Russian printers are up in arms about the indiscriminate nature of their government’s conscription policy complaining that it is leaving them short of staff and unable to fill crucial government contracts or produce the packaging needed to keep food on super market shelves.
While sanctions against the country have bitten in terms of reducing options on the consumables that printers use, they were able to keep pace with demand, albeit with some compromises on quality and materials. But the conscription of men into the army to fight in Ukraine is having greater impact on the economy.
One of the largest flexible packaging producers in the country, Polygrafoformenlie, normally has 350 staff. It is losing 150 to the conscription and these are skilled staff that cannot easily be replaced. It takes five years to train students that join the company with no experience. The company has pointed out that during the pandemic, those involved in the food production chain received protection and help. This no longer applies.
Polygrafoformenlie has a full order through to December printing 18,000 tonnes of packaging an hour. This has been boosted by the withdrawal from the market of some of the global and European packaging groups earlier this year. The company has invested in machinery and people to cope with the growth in orders.
Now as a result of the mobilisation it will be forced to cut back on production, reducing the number of shifts with the result that goods will not reach the shelves of the country’s shops, made worse by the introduction of traceability laws in Russia making it impossible to return to former times in terms of simpler, perhaps less hygienic packaging.
The company is not alone. Others have found that staff have refused to come to work for fear of conscription on the spot, leaving managers and directors vulnerable to prosecution. Attempts to demonstrate that companies are working to fulfil government orders, manuals for weapons systems for example, fall on deaf ears.
Others are trying to continue working without drawing attention to themselves by closing doors and windows to reduce the sound of machinery.
The activity has prompted pleas from associations representing packaging and separately book printers to postpone recruitment of their staff. There seems to have been some official protection for skilled workers in print, but the zeal of those running the mobilisation efforts on the ground can over rule the protection of a printed memo.
Of course the situation for Russian printers is nothing compared to the plight of many Ukrainian printers who have endured bombing and occupation and the destruction of their machinery and premises since February this year.
