Yes, yes. However outside of simple declarations on message boards, often the world is grey and it is not clear that there is violation of law. One may have strong, or not so strong reasons to so suspect. Reality is less neat than easy message board analysis.
A lot depends on the specifics of the case. Not all whistleblowers are noble fighters for morality after all, some are just worthless assholes, Look at Bradley Manning for example.
But lets set those cases aside. Lets assume that there is a valid moral reason to whistleblow. Perhaps a company is spiking food with arsenic or something. In this case, by choosing to whistleblow, the employee is actively choosing to NOT work with the company to fix the problem. The employee is choosing to bypass whatever the normal chain of command and procedure the company has for dealing with problems. He has chosen to act, without authorization, against the companies interests. His actions have announced to the world that he is not able to be trusted in his job.
Now there may be good reason for it. Perhaps he tried to fix the problem internally and failed. Maybe it’s a time sensitive thing where the public deserves to know, and quickly. Perhaps by knowing and not doing anything he would be making himself an accomplice to a crime. Still, whatever justification may be used, why shouldn’t a company fire an employee who ignores their procedures, can not be trusted, and is actively working to harm the company?
Personally, if I was working somewhere that was doing something so bad I thought it was morally justified to whistleblow, it would be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to continue working there and even indirectly aiding whatever sort of behavior was going on. I’d quit my job on the day I decided to release confidential information. Anything else is trying to have your cake and eat it too. Either the company is evil, in which case whistleblowing is justified AND working there is not. Or the company isn’t all that bad, in which case whistleblowing wouldn’t be needed to solve ethical issues.
It doesn’t have to be a whistleblower for someone to be set upon by higher powers. The pilot who recently posted videos of security flaws (that were mentioned in the news 10 years ago) was pounced on by the TSA and local authorities.
Because the company’s portrayal of events is shallow to the point of being a deliberate fabrication. He’s not “actively working to harm the company”, he’s actively working to harm a group of people who are deliberately poisoning people. Get rid of anyone who would sabotage the company’s reputation by deliberately poisoning people, and the problem of the whistleblower solves itself.
Why would you fire the people who are causing the problem, and lose that many people, when you could just fire one person? And why would you want to reward whistleblowing, when it would mean you’d have to fire even more people?
And you seem to be trying to say that the people causing the problem caused the bad reputation. You’re acting as if the whistleblower had an obligation to tell. As far as the company is concerned, they didn’t.
Let’s say you did something technically illegal–drugs is good one around here. And lets say your friend called the cops on you. Even knowing that doing drugs is illegal, would you not be mad at your friend? You may have done something illegal, but it is your friend who caused you to be caught.
Businesses don’t like being caught, so they punish the person who caused them to be caught. That way, when they do something illegal in the future, people will think twice before allowing themselves to be caught again.
Like I said, it depends on circumstances. There are times I fully agree with the whistleblower. They are times I think the whistleblower is a fucking moron. But see, from a companies standpoint, the whistleblow is not doing their job and they are undermining other peoples jobs. Companies have highly paid people to interact with the press. Companies have people responsible for procuring safe ingredients. Companies have policies on how disagreements or issues should be resolved. Some random yahoo who’s job is none of those revealing company secrets isn’t the ideal way to handle things, and the company has every right to nail someone to the wall who violates their procedures and undercuts the authority of people who are actually responsible for whatever it is the whistleblower is squealing about. Sometimes the press needs to be told anyway, but thinking a company is going to be glad or reward betrayal is just silly.
Plus, as I said before, if a company I worked for was doing something so horrible I felt it was needed to whistleblow, they’d be doing something so horrible I’d feel it was needed to resign.
The question as asked tacitly buys into the assumption that whistleblowers = goodies, and government/corporations = baddies. If that is the situation, the OP answers itself. The villain continues on the course of villainy in a way that is entirely predictable.
But as others have observed, it is commonly not that simple.
In my experience, whistleblowers are very frequently difficult management problems with hair-triggers for self-righteous indignation. I recall one who simply had a different view from his (superior and more experienced) police officer supervisor about the best way to place radar speed traps, but in his rather brittle world view, it wasn’t possible for reasonable minds to differ or for anyone but him to be right, so he took on himself the mantle of heroic whistleblower. But he was wrong.
Similarly, there is the entirely cynical whistleblower who is underperforming and knows he is about to be disciplined so he whistleblows on whatever he can (often some relatively harmless peccadillo that could have been sorted out internally) just to attract whistleblower protection. Same thing is common enough with pre-emptive bullying claims.
These things are not at all uncommon. Movies and the press tend to portray whistleblower cases in black and white terms, in the first case for narrative clarity and in the second out of self interest. But if a company is presented with a case that is grey, it is perfectly entitled to defend itself. Whistleblowers do not have a monopoly on being right. A predisposition on the part of readers of racy news stories to believe the worst does not mean that all allegations of wrongdoing are correct.
I make no observation that there are no genuinely heroic whistleblowers - clearly there are. Nor do I make any comment about whether genuinely heroic whistleblowers (as against the problematic ones) represent the greater proportion overall. But the latter are a significant species of the overall genus. That is why passing whistleblower protection laws requires pause for thought. You can wind up creating perverse incentives very easily.
[FONT=“Garamond”](did you steal this?
)What a spectacular quote for the ages![/FONT]
Very sad. and unfortunately very very true. I guess the burning question is…why would you work for a man, company, or organization that asked you to compromise yourself? Doesn’t that then say more about YOU than it does the company??
They’re working on it:
There are various state provisions of similar nature.
To the OP:
Several thoughts:
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There’s no such thing as acts by an “organization.” The corruption or mis-management, if any, is carried out by individuals within the organization (albeit in the organization’s name). Not shockingly, the corrupt acts are often/usually carried out/approved by “TPTB” whom you mention. Exposing corruption means exposing corrupt acts by, oftentimes, presiding senior management of the organization. Human nature is such that only a very small minority of people will want to reward someone who criticizes or exposes their possibly or definitely bad acts or omissions.
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Few organizations crave bad publicity, and whistleblowing almost always has the potential to lead to bad publicity that will impair the credibility or profitability of the organization (or its leadership) going forward.
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Organizations are or have the tendency to be clannish. “Airing dirty laundry” to the public or government, who “don’t understand our business anywhere as well as we do,” is seen as a betrayal, just as spreading family discord outside the family would be.
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Many if not most people who go so far as to drop a dime on the organization are, at least by that point, disaffected to a significant degree from the organization’s mission, culture, etc. I am NOT saying they are “just malcontents looking for petty revenge.” They may well be disaffected precisely because of their legitimately-principled discomfort with the bad acts they’ve become aware of. But people have a way of knowing when someone is “not with the program,” and in the weeks/months/years leading up to the whistleblower’s final decision to report wrongdoing, it is very likely that he has gotten a reputation, or given an impression, as an outlier, not a team player, troublemaker, etc., esp. if he’s raised concerns internally (which most people would do first) and been rebuffed. It’s very easy for human nature to treat such an already-suspect team member as a turncoat when he takes the ultimate non-team step of reporting the organization to outsiders. The idea of killing the messenger was familiar going back to antiquity.
Some people are loyal to the company. It’s like a tribe to them. They’ll do anything for it. They’re as foolish as the liberals who hate corporations. A worker is a tool; and the company is nothing more than a vehicle for income.
Corrupt companies who do stuff that is truly whistle-blower worthy will collapse under the weight of their own internal problems. That said, if you clearly see corruption inside a company it is better to leave and work for someone else, or start your own business, than to get caught whistle-blowing and be branded a snitch. As most business owners will tell you, snitch rhymes with… well, you know.
Of course, if your employer is about to get someone killed, that’s when things get a little messy.
Not if they pick their battles and cover their tracks well.
Does your obligation to keep quiet end once you quit?
That depends on how well you cover your tracks. 
Insofar as whistleblowers should be considered untrustworthy for spilling dirt, it’s useful to recognize that different stakeholders within a corporation may have different interests. For the crooked CEO leading the company into ruin for personal gain, whistleblowers are indeed people to be despised, but a pension fund that owns a significant chunk of the company’s stock would see things differently. Unfortunately for the whistleblower, the shareholders (and the board of directors they elect) aren’t in a good position to protect them from disgruntled executives.
Sorry, not getting you. Unless you mean that by exposing one company, you could ruin your rep with a lot of others.
That’s what I was getting at.