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Cold Truth
Cold Truth
Cold Truth
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Cold Truth

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There is a body of men and women who buy and sell shares in companies and thereby earn the wherewithal to live. Some of them buy shares in mining companies. The pursuit of money blinds many of them to the things that other people are doing to keep that money keep coming in. Between the shareholders and the reality of a mining operation are the directors; people who feed on the ignorance of the shareholders and the need for the members of the workforce to survive. They make the decisions about what will or will not be done on the mine; the decisions that keep people safe or expose them to injury or death. Death is no respecter of persons; shareholders die, Company directors die and so, all too often, do the workers. The difference is that shareholders are in control of their environment as are directors; not one of them is really in any danger because of the circumstances in which they work. The employees at the bottom however must eat, so must work and largely do what they are told. If death's door is opened around them they are, to all intents and purposes trapped. Between the workers and the senior people are the supervisors and lower level managers; their work is to achieve high production results, reduce costs and eliminate accidents. They are also the experts. They know what must be done and how it must be done. They do not have the authority to enforce most of their knowledge or to spend the money they should. Everything must be approved, must be controlled for the sake of a little more profit. Workers and countries are frequently exploited. Directors and boards are frequently axed if profits are not good. This story is about the men in the middle who fight to look after both workers and company; to make both ends satisfy conflicting needs. It is a true account of a series of events which led inevitably to disaster. It is set in Finland but could be about any number of mine sites all over the world. It is about the inevitability and patience of death, about love and friendship and about sincere efforts to provide the minimum safety needs of a mining operation. It is about the difficulties experienced by foreign workers on a remote location. But it is more especially about the game corporations play and the risks they are prepared to take with the lives and health of their employees to add more profit to the bottom line and keep the shareholders happy.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherRoger Russell
Release dateOct 30, 2013
ISBN9781311734631
Cold Truth
Author

Roger Russell

Born in 1947 in Eldoret, Kenya Roger attended school in Bournemouth, UK and St David's College in Johannesburg, SA. Roger Russell fell into a long drop toilet when he was three years old, out of a car when he was four. He went on to almost drown himself at six, cut through his left leg when he was seven and crush his right arm when he was nine. By the time he was eleven he had spent over a year in hospital and had been the recipient of many hundreds of stitches. He was banned from playing soccer or rugby and could not run to save his life. He started in the mines at nineteen and lost his finger in an accident before a month had passed. He joined the U/G Rescue team and was gassed, trapped and lost underground within the space of a single year. Roger married in 1968 and is the father of four children by his first wife, Sharon, to whom he was happily married for twenty five years before she died of cancer in 1993. He has since remarried and lives with Cynthia on a 30 foot motor cruiser in Hermitage Marina near St Ives in the UK. They have one child, a boy named Gordon after Roger's father. In 1993, after the death of his wife, Roger walked from Beit Bridge on the Northern border of South Africa to Cape Town, a distance of 2000km. He slept alongside the road and walked alone and un-armed through one of the worst political times the country had ever seen. He saw then and has continued to see immense power in common people. In 1999 he walked right around South Africa to support a much maligned South African Police Services. He was mugged by a squatter camp gang, attacked by a policeman in a remote station in the Transkei and swept away in a flash flood in the Orange Free State. He has seen police barracks that were worse than some prison cells, met and spoken with criminals, saints and politicians. The British media called him a South African hero and Steve Tshwete, the South African Minister of Safety and Security at the time said he was truly a South African patriot. Roger has also walked in America on two occasions, promoting South Africa and cancer awareness to the people of California, Nevada, New Mexico and other states. Roger has written several books all of which he plans to publish with Smashwords in time.

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    Cold Truth - Roger Russell

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