You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Publisher John Wiley & Sons has begun the consultation process over making up to 42 positions redundant from offices in Oxford, Chichester, Boston, Melbourne and Weinheim, with the work being shifted to its offices in Singapore.
The positions at risk come from the central marketing services, and exhibitions and conference operations, both of which are departments from the STMS division; of the total number, 30 positions are based in the UK. The announcement was made internally last week.
Susan Spilka, director of corporate communications for Wiley, told The Bookseller that not all of the positions being reviewed would necessarily be cut.
"We have just started the consultive process, so we don’t know the full number yet," she said. "We did go through a consultive process with the content management positions [that were made redundant] last year and there were a lot of changes to the plan once it was finally through the consultation." Last year's wave of redundancies resulted in just under 30 people losing their jobs. However, this was less than half the original number of positions being reviewed.
Spilka said the company would attempt to "redeploy" people whose positions were cut within the company, or assist those who look for work outside the business, stressing they were all "valued colleagues".
She added: "We have some very talented staff... but the structure itself has a lot of gaps and workflow inefficiencies."
Both sets of redundancies come as a result of the integration of the Blackwell business - which was acquired two years ago - into Wiley, and the "inefficiency of work being dispersed across multiple locations", she added.
"We believe that by consolidating those operations in one location, buiding on this publishing services operations we already have in Singapore, we can free up resources so we can reinvest in the business in a more productive manner." Although there were no plans for any further waves of job cuts, Spilka said she could not rule it out.
"We gained an excellent publishing services operation in Singapore with the acquisition, and we are building on it," Spilka said. "It has been a couple of years [since the acquisition] and we are seeing what is working and what needs redressing and rethinking."