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Whistle-Blowing In The Work Place

Kevin Coleman
Business Ethics
Dr. Robert E. Lofton
2 June 2008

Whistle-blowing in the workplace: Do we stand by and allow business corruption as usual or prepare to take a fall for something?

It sometimes requires uncommon courage, as whistle-blowing in the workplace is not so easy to do. What motivates you? Is it revenge, ethics or a combination? To take a closer look, let’s consider what is whistle blowing and explore a few conditions used to justify whistle-blowing, and concluded with how companies can benefit from a whistle-blowing policy.  

What is a whistle-blower or whistle-blowing?

Let’s make it clear that informers and snitches are individuals, who reveal information for personal enrichment or a means to get at others. However, whistle-blowers like Bobby Boutris   a Federal Aviation

Administration employee are generally conscientious people who expose some wrong doing, often at great personal risk such as death threats.

Whistle-blowing is the voluntary release of nonpublic information, as a moral protest, by a member or former member of an organization outside the normal channels of communication to an appropriate audience about illegal and/or immoral conduct in the organization or conduct in the organization that is opposed in some significant way to the public interest.

Given the high price that whistle-blowers sometimes pay, should people really be encouraged to blow the whistle? Yes, Boutris testified that there was too cozy of a relationship between an FAA supervisor and the airline that allowed Southwest to fly damaged planes.   He mentions six of the planes had a crack in their fuselage and multiple cracks, ranging from one inch to three-and-a-half inches long. In this statement, it became clear the airline flew unsafe planes. The reality is as a loyal passenger thinking nothing of a routine flight from Washington DC to Los Angeles, a once relied route of transportation, is the end result that could have been fatal.   Even...