Recognizing Retaliation: The Risks and Costs of Whistleblowing
If you plan to challenge the agency or corporation that employs you, you should know
the tactics of retaliation most often used against whistleblowers.
Spotlight the Whistleblowers
This common retaliatory strategy seeks to make the whistleblower, instead of his or her
message, the issue: employers will try to create smokescreens by attacking the source's
motives, credibility, professional competence, or virtually anything else that will work
to cloud the issues s/he has raised.
Manufacture a Poor Record
Employers occasionally spend months or years building a record to brand a whistleblower as
a chronic problem employee. To lay the groundwork for termination, employers may begin to
compile memoranda about any incident, real or contrived, that conveys inadequate or
problematic performance; whistleblowers who formerly received sterling performance
evaluations may begin to receive poor ratings from supervisors.
Threaten Them into Silence
This tactic is commonly reflected in statements such as, "You'll never work again in
this town/industry/agency. . ." Threats can also be indirect: employers may issue gag
orders, for example, forbidding the whistleblower from speaking out under threat of
termination.
Isolate or Humiliate Them
Another retaliation technique is to make an example of the whistleblower by separating him
or her from colleagues. This may remove him or her from access to information necessary to
effectively blow the whistle. Employers also may exercise the bureaucratic equivalent of
placing a whistleblower in the public stocks: a top manager may be reassigned to tasks
such as sweeping the floors or counting the rolls of toilet paper in the bathroom. Often
this tactic is combined with measures to strip the whistleblower of his or her duties,
sometimes to facilitate subsequent termination.
Set Them Up for Failure
Perhaps as common as the retaliatory tactic of isolating or humiliating whistleblowers by
stripping them of their duties is its converse-overloading them with unmanageable work.
This involves assigning a whistleblower responsibilities and then making it impossible to
fulfill them. One approach is to withdraw the research privileges, data access, or
subordinate staff necessary for a whistleblower to perform the job. Another is to put the
whistleblower on a pedestal of cards-to appoint him or her to solve the problem s/he has
exposed, and then refuse to provide the resources or authority to follow through.
Prosecute Them
The longstanding threat to attack whistleblowers for "stealing" the evidence
used to expose misconduct is becoming more serious, particularly for private property that
is evidence of illegality. Government workers even have been threatened with prosecution
under a McCarthy-era statute for being "disloyal" to the United States, after
they made disclosures to or participated in meetings with environmental groups involved in
lawsuits challenging illegal government activity. Until adoption of an anti-gag statute,
passed annually in appropriations legislation since 1987, workers with security clearances
risked prosecution unless they obtained advance permission before blowing the whistle
(even on information that was not marked as classified), effectively waiving their
constitutional rights.
Eliminate Their Jobs or Paralyze Their Careers
A common tactic is to lay off whistleblowers even as the company or agency is hiring new
staff. Employers may "reorganize" whistleblowers out of jobs or into marginal
positions. Another retaliation technique is to deep-freeze the careers of those who manage
to thwart termination and hold on to their jobs: employers may simply deny all requests
for promotion or transfer. Sometimes it is not enough merely to fire or make
whistleblowers rot in their jobs. The goal is to make sure they "will never work
again" in their fields by blacklisting them: bad references for future job prospects
are common.