If there's one thing that raises the hackles of UK printers, it's the exodus of print to developing nations. But worries of squeezed margins or being cast adrift by customers pale in comparison to the menace faced by some overseas printers.
Spare a thought for handlers manning the presses at Sri Lanka's leading English-language newspapers. In the early hours of the morning on Wednesday 21 November, 12 masked men burst into the print room of Leader Publications, which produces the Sunday Leader, Morning Leader and Irudina Sinhala. They took the security guard hostage before proceeding to douse the kit in petrol and set it ablaze, also destroying bundles of papers ready for distribution.
Lost work, not to mention 'downtime by fire' might sound bad enough, but it could be even riskier to work in print in Hyderabad, southern India. On Friday 16 November, a local printing plant owner was abducted by a nine-member gang, beaten with sticks and burned with cigarettes before being rescued by police, only to die in hospital a few days later, according to national paper The Hindu.
But the award for most hard-up printers must go to employees of Iraq's biggest printing plant, the 900-staff Dar Al-Nahrain, or 'House of Mesopotamia'. Established as a government security printer in the 1980s, presses at the site ran hot throughout the bloody Iran-Iraq war, withstood looting following the fall of Baghdad, held strong despite moonlighting as a counterfeit site while the city was in post-war chaos and was quickly up and running once 'order' was re-established. Now they're facing the squeeze from a government fervently trying to shut them down and their problems are far from over.
According to global union UNI Graphical, "many staff members have been killed on their way to and from work". Yet the plucky employees have told reporters they're prepared to become "martyrs" to keep the plant up and running.
So, next time you're decrying the flood of work to cheaper overseas economies, think of what those humble printers are putting up with to roll out jobs at rock-bottom prices.