Self-immolation shows that France Telecom suicide saga not over

An employee of France Telecom-Orange set himself on fire in his office parking lot on Tuesday, reviving the painful memory of a string of suicides that has gripped the telecommunications giant for three years.

A 57-year-old man committed suicide on Tuesday morning by setting himself on fire in the parking lot of a France Telecom-Orange office. It was the second suicide among the staff of the telecommunications operator this year, and a painful reminder of the wave of suicides that gripped the company in 2008 and 2009.

A spokesperson for the telecommunications giant, a former state monopoly, said that the incident happened at their site in Mérignac, near the southwestern city of Bordeaux. “Rescuers who arrived on the scene were only able to confirm the employee’s death”, the management said in a statement, adding that a trauma centre had been established at the site.

The name of the deceased employee was not made available immediately, but a co-worker told the AFP news agency that he was a father of four. Sources within the company have said the suicide victim was a worker representative of the CFDT union.

The problem at France Telecom is the same one in the U.S. Post Office. It’s a failure to provide Cubicle Level Protection where it is needed and the failure to warn employees about computer use or knowledge work performed in the home with repeating detectable movement in peripheral vision.

Subliminal Distraction, a normal feature in everyone’s physiology of sight, was discovered to cause mental breaks for office workers forty years ago. The cubicle was designed to block peripheral vision for a concentrating worker to stop the problem in offices by 1968.

France Telecom bought modern workstations but either installed them incorrectly or made changes after a correct installation.

Video from French TV programs shows defective workstations. Pictures on-line of an “Orange” worker shows him sitting at an open table where other family or pets could walk by as he uses his laptop computer.

The Post Office does not use Cubicle Level Protection and several of the shooters have been mail sorters. That job would require Cubicle Level Protection.

These same suicides are happening at Foxconn’s city/factory in China. They regularly happen to college students here.

It’s the level of mental investment used that allows Subliminal Distraction exposure to happen.

The mental event happens with a massive number of failed subliminal attempts to startle. This exposure is undetectable by the victim because of the way your brain functions to subliminally detect threat-movement and attempt the vision startle reflex.

The problem, discovered and solved forty years ago, is believed to cause only a harmless temporary episode of confusion. But designers see only exposure from an eight hour work day.

The suicides likely have more than one place of exposure so they have exposure levels equal to a college student.

http://VisionAndPsychosis.Net has pages with these pictures. The “Letters” page is a simple presentation of the unrealized history of these mental breaks.

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