When the CEOs and Sales Reps get sick?

Posted by: karlmuller30

Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:54 am (PST)

This is a very, very serious issue. The cellphone companies here, we know for a fact, keep "black books" of health issues involving their own employees, top secret stuff. In South Africa, with its history of strong unions, we decided a while back that occupational health of telecoms workers was probably our single strongest route to cracking this industry apart here. I am have been sitting here for months with the e-mail address of the Communication Workers' Union to send them a memo. When I get time ...

One very interesting fact has emerged. The regular technicians don't like working on live masts, so they hire casual workers here to paint and clean masts -- literally, people picked up by the side of the road by "labour bureaus", which have mushroomed here. Now, actually, it happens that the ANC government including Thabo Mbeki have railed regularly against what they call "casualisation of labour", in which part-time jobs are given to people, meaning that they don't have the normal protection of full-time jobs (stuff like medical aid etc), so this is a good issue to hook on. We have had reports of these workers getting seriously ill, and had similar reports from Democratic Republic of Congo, where cellphones are a big deal. We know of mast workers here who get home to find their whole bodies are bright red, as if they've had bad sunburn...

I have spoken to some workers who are perfectly aware of the problems -- they are forced by their jobs to carry and use cellphones, it's a condition of their contracts, and they live with blinding headaches and fatigue. Others are in a deep state of denial. But the guys who know, will not keep quiet forever.

If this industry is really going to be blown apart, it will have to be with support from "insiders". This is actually the crux of any real genocide charge -- you have to **prove** conspiracy, and that is very difficult to do without inside information or at least documentation. From what I've heard, Robert Kane's Cellular Telephone Russian Roulette may be a good start in this process, as I understand it he shows that the industry was aware of health risks. It's very interesting that this book is totally unavailable, if anyone has a copy and can give some of this info, I'd be very grateful. If in particular it can be shown that the industry was aware of genotoxic effects (and they surely must have been, from the Russian research) then we have them cold.

Interesting -- the CEO of Vodacom in South Africa, Alan Knott-Craig, has been in and out of hospital for at least a year with severe heart problems that are just not getting any better. His son (also Alan) is the CEO of a wi-fi company called iBurst, and is currently on a kick saying that we must all be optimistic in South Africa. His big problem at the moment is finding places to put base stations:

http://www.iweek.co.za/ViewStory.asp?StoryID=171671

-- I hope to put a little dent in his optimism soon. However, even the rah-rah crowd has a few cynical comments about him, as you'll see from this site:

http://sarocks.co.za/2008/02/02/alan-knott-craig-believes-in-sa/

-- the first comment from this "positive" website reads:

"Sorry, tough to be positive about a guy involved with a company that is in the middle of running a huge SMS scam, makes stupid amounts of profit while we still pay through our a... for telecoms in this country. "Stick it buddy. "It's easy to be positive when your bonus for the year is in millions."

Anyway: if you ever meet someone working in the industry, ask them what they know. It's an interesting thing. I gave a 5-minute talk at a residents' meeting here in Johannesburg, about a planned mast in a church steeple (the steeple was only 8m high, so it was going to be blasting into people's houses). We stopped that mast dead, but it was interesting that the only person who got up and attacked me at this meeting, was a professor of occupational health at the University of the Witwatersrand, who told me I was talking nonsense and there were no health risks with cellphone masts. I collared him after the meeting, and it turned out he knew absolutely none of the EMR research, he was going by a report in the Finnish journal of occupational medicine. I found it incredible that the one attack I got, was from someone whose job it is to protect people from stuff like dangerous radiation. There is a lesson here. The henhouse is being guarded by the whole gang of foxes.

Very busy here, sorry, had no time to post, even this is difficult, no time to check this properly ... but it's a very crucial issue.