Normally I can chuckle at El Reg's hyperbolic sense of humour, because it tends to have at least some connection with logic and reality. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with telephone sanitizers. Unless in some weird parallel universe "sanitizer" is now a synonym for technician or engineer.

The original joke was that people specifically employed to _clean_ telephone equipment - not those responsible for its functionality - were deemed useless to society, although (spoiler alert) that assumption may have been a grave mistake on the part of the Golgafrinchans...