Indiana printing plant to close, ending 525 jobs
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A company operating a northern Indiana printing plant has told state officials it will close, eliminating jobs for about 525 workers in September.
LSC Communications said in a notice to the state Tuesday that LSC Print Solutions in Warsaw expects to let the employees go between Sept. 10 and Sept. 24.
“This plant closing is expected to be permanent; the entire plant will be closed,” LSC Communications said in its Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice.
The plant was established by RR Donnelley & Sons Co. in 1958. Warrenville, Illinois-based LSC Communications acquired the plant in 2016.
Warsaw Mayor Joe Thallemer said the company informed him of the decision Tuesday morning.
“Nobody wants to wake up and go into work and find out their job is being eliminated in two months,” Thallemer said. “That’s a lot of employees and families in this community that are going to have to switch employment, potentially have to be retrained, find a new job and go through some hardship along the way.”
LSC Communications has been struggling due to a steady decline in demand for long-run catalog and magazine printing. In January, it announced it was closing two of its facilities in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and ending employment for 650 workers. The company said the work at those plants would be shifted to the Warsaw plant and to a facility in Minnesota.
In September 2020, LSC closed a plant in Kendallville and terminated more than 300 workers.
“The closure of our Warsaw plant was a very difficult decision to make, and it weighs heavy on our hearts,” LSC Chief Operations Officer Ernest Carey said in a letter to Thallemer. “Our team members in Warsaw represent the finest of the finest, and if it were only for them, we would still be a thriving business. Unfortunately, the demand for gravure printing—that once made this a thriving business—no longer exists in the market. With ink and paper costs rising and page counts lowering, catalogs and magazines are either switching to offset printing or greatly reducing their print runs. With respect to gravure printing and here in Warsaw, we held in there as long as we could.”
LSC was acquired in 2020 by Connecticut-based private equity firm Atlas Holdings in a $347.5 million bankruptcy sale.