Bravo to the BPIF membership for voting to exclude pre-packs. At last some concrete and direct action to make life more difficult for those who pre-pack for convenience.
The slight wrinkle being, I can't help wondering how many of those who fall in the dodgy pre-pack bracket would bother with the niceties of BPIF membership anyway. Does the membership currently include any notorious pre-packers? I guess one could say that technically Polestar pre-packed back in 2006, although it was the group's investors who lost their shirts not its trade creditors. Are there any latter-day masters of the dark arts of pre-packing in the existing membership? Will any upcoming regional meetings involve a bit of embarrassed shuffling and a lack of eye contact with Johnny Prepack? I avidly await more details of how this is all going to pan out.
Unfortunately the sort of company directors who are willing to ride roughshod over employees and creditors on the basis that pre-packing is legal, if not ethical, are hardly likely to lose sleep over this. It's the government that really needs to take action to put a stop to such connivances.
Elsewhere, I was faintly amazed to learn that Michael Johnson will have been in post for ten years when he steps down this time next year. I'm sure I remember him saying he was only going to stay for three.
Anyhow, I hope Michael's entirely understandable desire to go out with something of a bang, flourish and/or fanfare doesn't see the BPIF rush into some sort of merger deal with manufacturing federation the EEF. This, of course, was formerly the Engineering Employers Federation. Does the 21st century printing industry really have that much in common with engineering - 90% of EEF members are exporters "and nearly 40% export more than half of their turnover". As I understand it the EEF is a much larger organisation, so I'm envisaging a scenario whereby the BPIF would end up as some sort of special interest group within it, and I'm not sure I like the idea of that.
