Whistleblower Complaints and the Brautigan Library

Whistleblower Complaints and the Brautigan Library

Richard Brautigan’s novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 features a special library near the Presidio in San Francisco.  This library holds books donated by their authors.  The books are not published, nor are they available for check out from the library.  They are books for having been written, not for reading.  When the library becomes too crowded with donations, some are moved to a hermetically sealed cave elsewhere in northern California.  Sometimes whistleblower complaints feel like books in the Brautigan library, completed by their authors but unappreciated by anyone else.

We don’t always learn why the donors wrote their books.  An elderly woman spent five years writing hers and said the experience was wonderful.  She donated the book soon after she finished it.  One man brought in a book he had written thirty years earlier.  It had been rejected 459 times by publishers.  He felt old, he said.  Another spent 20 years writing his book in barely legible longhand.  He staggered out, possibly under the influence of alcohol, after dropping off his book.

We don’t really know what sends whistleblowers into action, either.  Our apologists refer to prosocial impulses.  Whistleblowing is a moral act.  We claim we could not have lived with ourselves if we had stayed silent – which J. Fred Alford calls moral narcissism.  We were just doing our jobs.  But our adversaries routinely win when they insist we were disgruntled employees and we made our disclosures in bad faith.

Some of the authors wanted to sum up their wisdom.  One wrote about chickens.  Another about winning the war in Vietnam.  A man compiled seven volumes on the state of Nebraska, which he had never visited.

When we begin our whistleblowing, we, too, believe we have some special knowledge.  We know what the organization did, and we know the relevant law.  We want to put it to good use.  But maybe we get things wrong.  Brautigan suggested the woman who wrote On Kissing had never been kissed.  If so, her view might be skewed. 

Or maybe what we have just isn’t that important.  A girl in a red dress brought a book about a pancake.  But she was only seven years old.  More is expected of whistleblowers.

When one begins a project – a book or whistleblowing, say – it is with hope.  Whistleblowers hope justice will be done, we will get even with someone, we will get back what we deserve, or we will win some reward.  We pray someone will pay real attention to our efforts.  Like the guy with the record-breaking number of rejection notices, often we don’t get what we want.

A difference between us and Brautigan’s authors is the end point.  Taking a book to the Presidio library marks an end to the enterprise.  The writer may slip it shyly onto the counter or slam it down.  Either way, it is done.  But whistleblowing leaks through to the rest of our lives.

For some, the experience can extend indefinitely.  Almost 50 years after Daniel Ellsberg rose to fame he still wins awards for his courage.  Edward Snowden’s life was forever changed by his decision to reveal what offended him.  Jim Holzrichter lost his audit career as a result of Northrup although he picked up a new calling as a consultant on whistleblower cases.  Robert Purcell kept his case going for 18 years until the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal.

Even after our project has ended – after we’ve run out of money or energy to keep it going – like a bad divorce it continues to affect the way we see the world.  That’s why settlement agreements usually require the whistleblower never to seek employment with the organization again[1].  Otherwise, if we return we’ll just make more trouble – as the TSA found after it had to take Robert MacLean back.

My whistleblowing experience has stained the way I view charities.  Four plus years after I was fired, I still look for signs HomeFirst will go out of business.  That it lacks the cash to repay its short-term credit line gives me a sordid thrill.  I am convinced other groups are corrupt in their own ways.  Even organizations I have given money and time to in the past and may still do today, they probably fail ethically as much as HomeFirst.

My past whistleblowing opened a distance between me and the world that didn’t exist in the same way before.  A lack of trust is what I have.  Or perhaps I am just getting old, and I respond to having been rejected more than I like.

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[1] For example, Jeanette Dawson, Carol Slavish, and Michelle Holmes.  The settlement agreement HomeFirst Services proposed to me contained similar language.

Whistleblowing and Social Control

Whistleblowing and Social Control

Whistleblowing is an act of defiance that triggers social controls.  It expresses a grievance against an organization, and it provokes the organization’s outrage against the individual.  The exchange plays out according to the usual rules and has no need for talk of morality, according to Donald Black.

For Black in The Social Structure of Right and Wrong, social control includes any process people use to define and respond to conflict.  That includes criticism, gossip, litigation, punishment, compensation, avoidance, psychotherapy, witch-hunting, feuding and warfare.

Social control varies in style.  Different language and logic can apply.  Criminal law may be invoked or tort law.  The objective may be therapeutic for juveniles or the mentally ill.  A conciliatory approach may be taken in marital, labor, and international disputes. 

Black describes a variety of general responses to social conflict.  It can be tolerated.  The offender can be avoided.  The offended can take unilateral action (“self-help”) against the offender, possibly leading to reciprocal action that mounts to blood feud.  The two sides can negotiate an agreement with or without the help of a third party.  Sometimes the offender applies self-control by giving up or even committing suicide. 

Societies resolve their conflicts in different ways depending on their size, diversity, and legal sophistication. 

But across all the conflicts that result from deviant behavior, the high status party tends to win, Black writes.  The high status offender is less likely to be punished, and the low status, more.  The opinion of the high status person is more likely to be recognized as interesting or important.  Objective analysis doesn’t come into play except by accident.  Ethical evaluation is bent by status.

Into this setup walks the whistleblower.  He is most likely to lose although the magnitude of his loss is uncertain at first.  Many lose their jobs.  Some are blackballed and kept from finding new jobs – like Jessie Guitron, James Holtzrichter, and Grant Timmons.  

Black assures us in the crystalline terms of academia that our outcome was in the cards we were dwelt.  My project with HomeFirst Services was doomed to fail from the beginning.  I was the lesser power at the table, and the minor wrongs that I alleged gave me no more influence.  The governmental third parties were more closely aligned with HomeFirst which receives 8o% of its revenue directly or indirectly from the government.  So they favored HomeFirst.  That’s what I think.

In any case, HomeFirst unleashed the retaliations that others in my position have experienced and that Black describes as normal.  I was fired and lost my whistleblower retaliation case.

If I knew I would lose, what then?  Not just that I might lose or would probably lose, but if I knew for sure that I would fail, HomeFirst would be unaffected, and I would lose my job and some money besides, what then?  What if I also admitted that my motives were not entirely pure, just like HomeFirst and the State of California would point out.  What then?

Maybe I’d be brave and do it all anyway.  For the moral reasons I’d salvage from my mixed motives.  I’d find philosophical reasons to act like Camus’ Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill despite the certainty it would roll back.  Simple emotions would drive me: the way they pissed me off before I blew the whistle and after.

For some, the loss is neither academic nor fanciful.  Whistleblower Karen Silkwood famously died when Kerr-McGee applied self-help to shut her down.  In obscurity, Eliud Montoya’s loss was likewise tragic. 

Montoya worked on trimming crews at Wolf Tree for about 10 years.  In 2017 he began collecting information from the undocumented men who made up most of Wolf Tree’s workforce.  After his boss Pablo Rangel-Rubio recruited them to work at the company, he cashed their paychecks and kept a cut of the money.  The scheme generated $3.5 million for Rangel-Rubio and his brother.  In April Montoya complained to the company but wasn’t well received.  In August 2017 he filed a complaint with the EEOC.  The next day, two guys hired by Rangel-Rubio murdered Montoya.

When we embark on our whistleblowing projects we think we are unique.  We alone are standing up to power.  We alone are moral actors.  Although academics and support groups have described the bad things that happen to whistleblowers, we think our situation is one of a kind.  But Black assures us the problems we face and our lack of success are entirely natural.  That’s the way it’s been for decades – even millennia – and in all cultures.