A recent article in a national legal journal focusing upon employee whistleblowers underscores the vast amount of information available to educate whistleblowers on their rights against bad-faith employers. That is, there is a veritable mountain of advice existing to inform challenged workers what to do when they seek to fight back against wrongful job termination.
The above article also stresses the inverse too, though, namely this: There is seemingly very little in the way of “what not to do” data to guide workers under pressure who are squared off against employers clearly bent on retaliation and a workplace firing.
Many persons — including perhaps a fair number of people reading our blogs at the established Metro Detroit legal offices of Sterling Employment Law — likely understand the inclination of an unfairly treated worker to simply hit back hard at an underhanded employee in every way possible.
Candidly, that can be counterproductive and ultimately injurious to an employee claimant. The aforementioned legal piece duly stresses that there are “important don’ts of whistleblowing for employees who want to preserve the strength of their claims and avoid liability.”
An itemized list of taboos can run a broad gamut, embracing the need for restraint in everything from copying documents that point to alleged bad behavior to recording actions that evidence an employer’s hostility and liability.
The bottom line is that merely responding in an indiscriminatory way to employer wrongdoing will avail far less that will deployment of a targeted, well-considered strategy focused on specifics rather than generalities.
The above article underscores the key role that a proven team of employment law attorneys can play in defining strategy and promoting an optimal whistleblower outcome.
We will have more to say about that in our next blog post.