After Whistleblowing
To my mind, whistleblowing comes in three phases.
The core phase is what we usually consider the whistleblowing
project. That includes observing what
seems to be a legal or ethical violation.
Evidence is gathered, and the problem is described to management. They may fix the problem. Whether the problem is corrected or not, the
discloser can suffer retaliations, beginning with ostracism and accelerating
from there. In response to the
retaliations or to the organization’s failure to correct the wrong, the
whistleblower discloses violations to external authorities. If things go south, a lawsuit or other
complaint follows. Finally – perhaps as
soon as a year, more often after 3-5 years, sometimes after 10 years or more – the
issues are resolved.
Before the whistleblowing project can begin, though, preparations
must be made. The soil must be
prepared. The individual must gain the technical
knowledge necessary to identify a violation.
She needs the ethical and legal awareness to believe that a violation
should be corrected. And, importantly,
she must become sufficiently dissatisfied with the organization that she is
willing to deal with the likely consequences of her actions.
Then after the project is resolved, there will be
consequences. Some will be
financial. The whistleblower may lose
her job or miss out on raises or promotions because she has proven
untrustworthy. Her disloyalty will infect
her relations at work. Colleagues will
know she could betray them again. She
may test some personal relations outside of work. Marriages sometimes die from the experience.
C. Fred Alford[1]
wrote that many of our tightly held beliefs must be abandoned as a result of
our whistleblowing. Among them:
-
The individual matters
-
Law and justice can be relied on
-
Ours is a government of laws, not men
-
Individual will not be sacrificed for the group
-
Loyalty isn’t equivalent to herd instinct
-
One’s friends will remain loyal if colleagues do
not
-
The organization is not fundamentally immoral
-
It makes sense to stand up and do the right
thing
-
Someone, somewhere, who is charge, knows, cares,
will do the right thing
-
The truth matters, and someone will want to know
it
-
If one is right and persistent, things will turn
out all right in the end
-
Even if they do not turn out all right, other
people will know, understand
-
The family is a haven in a heartless world
-
The individual can know the truth of all this
and not become merely cynical
Discarding these ideas based on for-profit experiences seems
easy to me. I can quickly accept that greedy
Enron management were douche
bags. Likewise, it is obvious that pond scum
managers at Wells
Fargo pressured employees to open unauthorized accounts and fired them if
they complained. And that managers at
Uber were jerks, as Susan
Fowler revealed.
Do-good nonprofits should be different. But you don’t read as much about nonprofits
and their whistleblowers. They need a
special hook to get people’s attention, like a former President.
Sue
Veres Royal was Executive Director at tiny Happy Hearts Fund, which rebuilds
schools destroyed by natural disasters. Her
boss wanted to get Bill Clinton to its 2014 gala. Clinton said okay to a lifetime achievement
award as long as it came with a $500,000 honorarium paid to his foundation. Royal objected to that and a litany
of self-dealings by her boss.
A couple of weeks after the gala, she was dismissed with a modest
settlement. She continued to scuffle
with Happy Hearts attorneys. A year
after she left the charity, she wrote
skeptically about charity fundraising, but she is back in the business,
it seems.
I developed my own cynicism about nonprofits following my
HomeFirst experience. Asked for money to
help fire or flood victims, I want to know exactly what will be done with
it. I want accountability
that HomeFirst did not provide. And that
few
nonprofits offer.
I voted against a Santa
Clara County bond for affordable housing because I don’t trust the County
anymore after it mishandled HomeFirst’s $140,000
overbilling. If I had the chance, I would
vote against the Department of Housing and Urban Development because of the way
it is dealing with HomeFirst’s
$1.2 million overbilling. I am
skeptical of whatever the City
of San Jose and the State
of California might advocate. I doubt
the effectiveness of minimum wage guarantees from the
State and local
jurisdictions.
I volunteer in a few organizations, but I don’t trust them
as I once did. I think it would be
difficult to work in the nonprofit world again.
I look differently on friends who were not sufficiently
sympathetic when I was deep into my struggles with HomeFirst. Even though, three years later, I am amazed
by my own egoism in those days. Even though
my whistleblowing tragedy no longer seems quite as meaning-filled as I once thought
it was. But as I downplay the
significance of my act, I am still sickened by those who did nothing.
Whistleblowing can trigger many of life’s most
stressful events – being fired at work, a drastically changed financial
condition, a divorce, disruption of our usual habits. If we get through those possibilities without
too much damage, I think the biggest life-changing effect comes from our new
understanding of the world. Whether we
like it or not.
[1] Alford, C. Fred. Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and
Organizational Power.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. 2001. P. 49.
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