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.