Here’s
some food for thought -- something I
wrote for a term paper in 2001, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (of course
another “A” for the class).
A man who has difficulty finding a job is nothing new in
today’s society; so many jobs being outsourced and so many companies downsizing
and closing down because of the economic situation. With that contextual
information understood, I would deal with the scenario, using the following
rationale.
The man wants to support his family
and has finally found a job. The pressure from the happiness that everyone
feels after learning the news is the kind of pressure that makes people “do
foolish things,” as the old song goes. In addition, he has been working for six
months, has bought home 12 paychecks and the family’s standard of living has
been upgraded, a visual reminder to him each day he comes home and sees the
changes in the home, the car and the accouterments that the children are
enjoying. As a result of the material and physical changes, attitudes and
emotions are also on the upswing.
The factual matters about life
have just been expressed: it would be nice for life to just be about people and
about the smelling of roses and the sunshine. But it also has a series of
obstacles that could be called “opportunity costs.” The decisions we make to do
one thing usually means that we have sacrificed not doing another. This is one
of those instances.
When considering factual matters, we
must be as objective as possible in gathering those facts. We cannot fall prey
to other people’s manipulated manifestations of reality. If we stay true to the
facts, we will get the right results every time. If you are getting bad or poor
results, it is because you are not doing the right thing. You can be alive and
effective or dead and ineffective, but if you are alive an ineffective, you
might as well be dead.
The procedural knowledge involves
strategies for dealing with this problems. The fact is, the man has found
out that his manager is engaging in illegal activities on the job. By employing
procedural knowledge, we look at weighing goals and the decision of whether we
should blow the whistle or not. We also look at how this decision, in turn, going
to impact upon the short- and long-range qualify of living that he has worked
so hard to revitalize. How then, we ask at this stage, can this conflict be
handled?
Lifetime contextualization
means the roles and contexts of life and how they will may change over the life
span. With no job, the family bottoms out and the kids suffer. The wife may up
and leave because, as the saying goes, “She can do bad all by herself.” The man
is in a Catch-22 because so much of his life and livelihood is linked to the
job (i.e., a check). The context of the lifespan places pressure on this man to
do what is best for the long- and short-term, but also to do what is best in a
pragmatic and practical sense, not necessary a moral or ethical one.
A fourth component to wise judgment as
it relate to this scenario is recognition and management of uncertainty.
The future cannot be known in advance and life is, indeed, unpredictable.
However, it is what you DO know that serves as the basis for the decision that
has to be made. In recognizing and managing uncertainty, the first step is to
understand that there is nothing that is unknowable, only that which is
unknown, and solutions to not come to us from a goblin in the sky or some
spook, but from hard work, research and
study here below.
The core recognition, at this point,
is that there may be no perfect solution.
More importantly in this case, there may be no RIGHT solution. A man is
the sum of his functions, as the Bible teaches and, furthermore, a man is
judged by his works. The family unit is the most important of all institutions,
and it is the job of man and woman to hold it together. Remember: there may be
no perfect solution.
The last component is relativism
regarding solutions, meaning “the acknowledgement of individual and
cultural differences in values and life priorities.”
If the man blows the whistle on his
manager, he harms that man by getting him fired and possibly thrown in jail
(depending on the infraction). But if he blows the whistle, he will be the
subject and object of ridicule and scorn by fellow workers. He also puts his
family at risk for retaliation. He also stands the risk of adverse publicity
and, in the hands of a competent attorney,
could be made a scapegoat or fall guy for the actions of that manager.
This is a challenging case, and the
wise judgment scenario has been shared. My conclusion is that he place his
family first, and teach them along the way that morality is important and that
what he is doing is not something he is proud of. He should explain to his
family that a man is doing something bad at work and that he should tell, but
won’t because of the family’s situation. If the family says, “Go for it, dad”
or “Honey, I think you should tell,” then maybe he should. But more likely than
not, they will stand by him in his silence. At any rate, he would do well to
still as yet seek other employment with another company. One way or the other,
that manager has to be bought to justice. He just doesn’t have to be bought to
justice by this particular man.
What I have found in my analysis of
situations where whistleblowers are concerned, is that there is very little
room for error and also very little recognition for these brave people, Karen
Silkwood, Erin Brockavich, Medgar Evers, Caesar Chavez, Martin Luther King,
Jr., -- these are all whistleblowers, on various levels, who stood up against
the system.
This man has been unemployed once
before. He has felt the pangs of disappointment from his family, and probably
neighbors. He is aware of the job situation in America
As one of the components said, “there
may be no perfect solution.” Indeed, this is one of those times.
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