Campaign against closure at art factory

Workers at the ColArt company in Wealdstone, north west London, are fighting plans to close their factory.

The company announced on 1 July that it wants to close the site and move all the manufacturing of Winson & Newton art products to Le Mans in France.

This would mean the loss of 200 jobs.

The Unite union members at the firm accepted a pay freeze last year as they were told this would help secure the company’s future in Wealdstone.

Despite this, management have decided to go ahead and sack them all, saying that the site is too old for expansion.

But the factory makes an average pre‑tax profit of

£5.3 million per year.

Peter Mead, the Unite rep at the firm, told Socialist Worker, “If the factory closes then it will damage Wealdstone even more.

“It is not a flourishing area as it has recently lost a lot of manufacturing jobs.

“There is a 90-day consultation taking place at the moment. We are putting forward two proposals to keep ColArt in Wealdstone.

“One is to move to a new site so that the factory can expand and the other is that we stay at this site and face the cost issues to see what we can do about them.

“If nothing changes, we will look at balloting the members and see what they want to do about it.”

For campaign materials go to www.unitetheunion.org/keepcolartwealdstoneopen and email messages of support to [email protected]