Labor day

The good news for the mobilephone industry is carriers, manufacturers, trade associations and standards bodies are nearly free of health litigation for the first time in years. The bad news is the industry is about to be confronted by an overlooked actor in long-running controversy: the American worker.
Big Labor is throwing its mighty weight behind a small San Diego-based firm that quietly has spent the past few years assessing health risks posed to workers exposed at close range to high-level radiofrequency radiation emitted by the hundreds of thousands of wireless transmitters operated by cellular carriers, tower companies and state/local governments. It’s not a pretty picture, according to RF Check Inc. So the company developed a massive database of sites in hopes of making a business case to protect blue collar workers-like the Alaska technician who recently won a major workers’ compensation case against AT&T Inc.-from unwitting exposure to potentially damaging doses of wireless antenna radiation.
“Trade union members apply their professional skills on structures that host wireless transmission sites. Firefighters, electricians, roofers, painters and others are not trained in RFR safety. As a result, they are routinely over-exposed to radiofrequency radiation while working near wireless antennas,” said Robert Curtis, RF Check’s chief scientist and previously the top radiation expert at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The combination of a powerful mitigation tool-RF Check’s database-and lockstep-support by the International Association of Fire Fighters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Communications Workers of America, and the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Unions, could severely limit wiggle room for cellular carriers. AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp., T-Mobile USA Inc. and other carriers likely will be forced to the bargaining table with organized labor and RF Check. It is a new face on a legal exposure risk that carriers already enunciate in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“RF Check has identified a growing area of concern for our nation’s work force and has found a way to mitigate their exposure to RFR radiation,” said industry guru Andy Seybold, someone not regarded as wireless health rabble-rouser.
The heat on the wireless industry is apt to continue long beyond the swelter of the waning summer.