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Workers are the front lines for the safety of children’s products and our food, for the safety of nuclear power plants, hospitals, oil rigs—and in this case, for the safety of our democracy itself.
First there was one whistleblower—a person who had the courage to take on the president and, in so doing, triggered an impeachment inquiry. Now that person has inspired a colleague to speak up as well. It’s a story that has already had a seismic impact on our country.
It’s also the story of a worker.
These recent events are unprecedented, but as a lawyer who spent years enforcing workplace laws, they’re also strangely familiar to me: A worker learns of brazen violations of law and feels compelled to speak up. The boss and his buddies go bananas, demanding to know the worker’s identity, making veiled or explicit threats, disparaging the worker’s credibility.
The president hopes to silence the whistleblowers, saying the original complaint is a “Democratic hoax” and comparing the whistleblower’s sources to spies, even casually floating the word “treason.” His aides follow suit: Stephen Miller claimed the original whistleblower is part of the “deep state”—a new spin on the classic description of the “disgruntled” employee.
The individual who wrote the original complaint is somewhat different from a typical worker-whistleblower (if there is such a thing), not only with regard to his higher status career, but also in that this person comes from the intelligence community, which usually crushes whistleblowers underfoot, and which has had ongoing tensions with the president.
Nevertheless, I’ve seen the Trump/Miller playbook before. I’ve been witness to the abuse and retaliation that workers often face when they decide to become whistleblowers. A McDonald’s worker reported a gas leak to the fire department and was fired for doing so. An airport skycap reported grossly subminimum wages ($3.90 per hour); he was fired the day after appearing at a press conference with the state attorney general, despite having no disciplinary record in over a decade of working for the company. The #MeToo movement has surfaced countless examples of workers being pressured to stay quiet.
Nonetheless, some workers aren’t so easily silenced these days. The number of workers who went out on strike last year—teachers, health care workers, hotel employees, and others—was the highest it’s been in a generation. Perhaps this level of activity reflects what an MIT survey found last year: Workers overwhelmingly want more say on the job, and almost half would vote for a union.
In fact, worker activism has extended to concerns about societal well-being and the public good. Teachers want more funding, not just for their own salaries, but for education generally. Hundreds of workers walked out from the furniture company Wayfair when they learned the company had done business with a detention center holding migrant children. A former employee of the software company Chef recently deleted his code to protest its use by ICE. Although unrelated to traditional organizing concerns like pay or benefits, these actions are fundamentally deeply intertwined with working conditions. They relate to the most basic aspect of a job: what your work is being used for, the impact of what you do when you go to work each day.
Often, people don’t want to be complicit in doing work that is morally wrong, and they act as a matter of conscience. This is a large part of what motivated many of the workers I’ve met over the years. They spoke up not primarily for their own benefit, but rather because of concern about safety, about their co-workers, about right and wrong. Over and over, I heard some version of the same idea: This is not about me; I don’t want anyone else to go through what I’ve experienced. Others had an inherent sense of justice that compelled them to come forward; they believed in basic fairness and rule of law.
The whistleblowers who’ve come forward in the Trump-Ukraine affair—who appear to have worked at a high level of government—seem to have had a career that’s a world apart from fast-food and other low-wage workers. Yet they still have a lot in common.
Workers are the front lines for the safety of children’s products and our food, for the safety of nuclear power plants, hospitals, oil rigs—and in this case, for the safety of our democracy itself. When they can’t speak up, the consequences can be dire. The Boeing 737 MAX had fatal engineering flaws; Enron was a fraudulent house of cards; and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had deeply deficient safety practices. In all of these situations, there were worker witnesses who stated they didn’t report problems to authorities because of fear of potential retaliation. A culture of intimidation can lead to bad places, indeed.
These examples point to the need for better protections for workers who report serious illegality. The focus on these high-profile whistleblowers should be a catalyst for strengthening whistleblower laws in general, which are currently a patchwork. Protections vary from statute to statute and from state to state. Ideally, these laws would include strong protection against retaliation; confidentiality; standing for whistleblowers to bring their own lawsuits; and finally, incentives for coming forward. These goals are not unrealistic; the False Claims Act, for example, allows people reporting fraud against the government to file their own lawsuits. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service have paid millions of dollars to whistleblowers who have provided original information leading to successful enforcement actions.
Along with these statutory fixes, we need to fully understand the dynamics at play. The current whistleblowers and the president are at the forefront of two opposing impulses in society: the desire of the people to have a voice and a say, and the desire of the powerful to control and suppress that voice. Speaking up in the workplace can ultimately lead to a more full-throated voice in democracy. The president and his ilk don’t understand that people they see as “the help” are actually not inanimate objects, but have their own will and conscience, and the intent to exercise both.
Our country is exhausting these days. It’s wearying to maintain the outrage, and so the cruelty and insanity become normalized, even though this normalization, we are told, is the first step toward authoritarianism.
But then come the whistleblowers, who in the end are also workers, and show us how to keep pushing on.
