Stop the Presses!

Stop the presses! No, really, stop them. Ohhh, never mind. Apparently, the presses have pretty much stopped already.

As of February 2019, “printer” and “screen printer” are no longer official jobs listed by Labor Department according to this article from the Washington Post. “Printing support” jobs such as platemaking and prepress work have also been eliminated from their monthly report.

How sad is that?

And, yes, I realize the irony that I am citing an online story about the loss of printing jobs. But in my defense, I am assuming the story appeared somewhere in the Post’s printed edition.

Apparently, the list of US non-farm payroll jobs gets tweaked from time to time with new sectors being added and some being eliminated. The sector that includes printing lost about a third of its jobs since the start of the Great Recession—more than every other sector except clothing manufacturing, which has also been removed from the list. And as anyone who works in the graphics industry can attest, the number of printers was not exactly increasing before then. In fact, most of the printers that I have worked with over the years have, well, stopped the presses—permanently.

How sad is that?