Product Description

A factory worker is fired because her boss dislikes the political bumper sticker on her car in the parking lot. Another is canned after refusing to display an American flag at his workstation. A flight attendant is grounded because her airline doesn't like what she's writing in her personal blog. Is it legal to fire people for expressing themselves, even when it's unrelated to performing their jobs? Can you lose your job because of a bumper sticker? For many American workers, the answer is yes. In "Speechless," Bruce Barry confronts the state of free speech in the American workplace. He shows how employers and courts are eroding workers' abilities to express themselves on and off the job, with damaging consequences for individuals, their employers, and civil society as a whole. In defense of free speech in and around the workplace, Barry argues that the experience of liberty in a free society, as well as in life, in general, depends in part on the experience of liberty at work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #820646 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 285 pages

From Booklist
Barry, an academic and an ACLU official, presents his views on free speech at work or after work, contending that "a confluence of legal, political, economic and managerial forces make the workplace unfriendly, and growing unfriendlier, to free expression." The author joins others in arguing that a company's right to conduct business as it wishes carries an equal moral responsibility to respect the rights of others, including employees. Citing numerous case studies, Barry concludes that civil liberties are significantly constrained in the American workplace, and in this inhospitable climate, employees understand clearly the threat of negative consequences for their speech. Although the author recommends changes to law and management practices, he also tells us that the better alternative to legal reform is for managers to use discretion and common sense when dealing with individual expression; employers are advised to spend less time "obsessing over their employees' blogs." This is a thoughtful perspective on the ongoing controversy over employee rights. Whaley, Mary
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Citing numerous case studies, Barry concludes that civil liberties are significantly constrained in the American workplace, and in this inhospitable climate, employees understand clearly the threat of negative consequences for their speech....This is a thoughtful perspective on the ongoing controversy over employee rights." -- Mary Whaley, Booklist, May 15, 2007

From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR SPEECHLESS

"Attention: No more loose talk about American `democracy' until you've read Speechless! Bruce Barry exposes the shameful fact that most Americans are forced to check their civil liberties - and especially their freedom of speech - at the workplace door. I'm hoping this important book will inspire a new civil rights movement - this time for American workers of all collar colors."
-- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

"Bruce Barry's Speechless provides a thoughtful analysis of the intersection of employment and free expression. Barry makes a compelling argument that the trend toward greater restrictions on employees' speech has implications that reach beyond the office walls and jeopardizes the well-being of our democracy."
-- Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union

"Americans think they have freedom of speech all the time. Bruce Barry's important new book tell them they are wrong. Barry explains how we lose our freedom of speech every day when we go to work. This is a must read for anyone who cares about free speech."
-- Lewis Maltby, President of the National Workrights Institute

"Bruce Barry has written a comprehensive and thoughtful overview of the sadly impoverished state of freedom of speech for workers, public and private, in American society. It is a must-read for those who care about the vitality of public discourse, the state of civil liberties, corporate compliance with law, or the intelligent management of a modern workforce."
-- Cynthia Estlund, author of Working Together, Catherine A. Rein Professor of Law at New York University

"A generation of Americans growing up in the age of networking, blogging, and instant messaging will be surprised to learn they park most of their rights to free speech, expression, and association at the door of their workplace. Professor Barry's thorough analysis demonstrates how out of touch this is with our democratic values and suggests reforms that would allow us to be both good citizens and loyal, productive workers. He makes a good case for getting on with this long overdue task. A very good book."
-- Thomas A. Kochan, author of Restoring the American Dream, George M. Bunker Professor of Management and Co-Director, MIT Workplace Center

Customer Reviews

Informative for scholars, managers, and employees
As a business ethicist, I expected to find in Speechless a detailed discussion of the implications of voice and silence for ethics in organizations, with references to topics like whistle-blowing, groupthink, and moral imagination. I found that discussion in Chapter 9, which is about the right length for it, because those topics have been covered well elsewhere, and Chapter 9 is a good introduction to many of the important works in that area.

The rest of the book treats the restriction of expression in the workplace as an ethical problem of a different order, with implications both for the quality of life of individual employees, and for the quality of participation in political and cultural institutions outside the firm. But despite clear advocacy for greater freedom of expression in the workplace, Speechless also explores the risks that such freedom poses: a hostile working environment, partiality in public bureaucracies, employees driven to distraction by each other, or the legal and reputational threats that can arise when someone says something thoughtless. The result is a thorough, evenhanded, and entertaining study of a perennial problem: with liberty comes liability, both for those who grant them and for those who take them.

Speechless's readable discussions of the relevant legal frameworks and cases are particularly helpful. They facilitate not only understanding the tensions between goods at stake, but also identifying remedies that can be taken at both the public policy and the enlightened-management levels. For scholars interested in exploring the implications of speech and its restriction in the workplace, this book is a useful introduction to the perspectives of law and management on the problem. Managers trying to ascertain what they have a responsibility to control and what they have the freedom to permit will also find Speechless to be a valuable resource . . . as will employees who are curious or nervous about the risk posed to their careers by the scope of their convictions or their recreations.

Speechless is an important book
This is an important book, and I read it with a growing sense of its value and force. It is in the American dialogue - the great national debate that takes place at the water cooler as well as the blogosphere; the church picnic as surely as the corner bar - that the warp and hue of our nation's culture take shape - finally forming through policy, legislation and influence the environment that we, and those who follow us, will inhabit.

If this is correct, as Vanderbilt University professor Bruce Barry makes a solid case for in his timely, lucid and meticulously researched "Speechless - the Erosion of Free Expression" in the American Workplace (swerving neither left nor right as he goes) then certainly, if we are to have a true democracy, this dialogue must carry forward the beliefs of all Americans. Nor are these beliefs merely intended for the ballot box; indeed, they are the essence of what Dr. Barry refers to as the marketplace of ideas. For it is in this marketplace (as Dr. Barry makes plain) with its tension, its push and pull of competing voices, that arises the most vital and important element of a functioning democracy: Truth.

This notion of a marketplace of ideas and the necessity of its vitality is not new. In Chapter 6 ("Why Free Speech Works"), Dr. Barry quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous dissent in the 1919 Abrams v. United States, in which Holmes describes "the best test of truth" as "the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

A marketplace for ideas, from which truth is sometimes "roughly" (mostly roughly, it seems) constructed - this very truth which informs our laws and policies and national conversation - we have this very marketplace now, right? And it's protected by the First Amendment, right? In fact, in the Internet age, this marketplace for ideas is bigger and better than ever, right? So why write a book called "Speechless - the Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace"? Ok, so maybe we can't always say what we want in the workplace, but doesn't that still give us weekends and evenings for speaking our mind?

Wrong. And this is where "Speechless" especially shines - as a compelling, sometimes unnerving study of the vast patchwork quilt of law and policy that many of us confidently suppose is there to cover our back.

In "Speechless," Barry shows us how that quilt is doing an increasingly uneven job of protecting us (us mainly being employees but by extension here, all Americans) as it inevitably, along the way degrades our national dialogue. Building his case that our backs are either not covered, or not covered very well (nor with any kind of predictability), Barry travels the country, producing case after case of this employee and that employee losing his or her job for reasons complex and simple, large and small. Drawing out guidelines based on state action (i.e., the right that congress will not curtail our speech), differences in public vs. private employment, and exceptions like whistleblower protection (including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and others, we are left with a certain cold clarity: as a public-sector employee, "you have rights to free speech except where you don't," and rather worse for private-sector employees: "you have no right to free speech except when you do."

But it's not even that simple. Shoring up many of these free speech (or lack thereof) terminations (with, in these cases, their attendant litigation) is the rule of "at will" employment - basically meaning that both employee and employer either may be fired - or may quit - without "cause, notice or severance." In other words, if as an employer I decide I don't like your blog about, say, undocumented workers (regardless of what it says), and even though it has nothing to do with my company and you wrote it on your own computer, on your own time, I can fire you when you next walk in the door, and not hand over a penny in severance pay. (If as an employee, I don't like my boss's blog, I am free to quit my job without notice, etc, but I am the one without the paycheck.)

And as Barry points out, at-will employment is the "dominant employee relations policy in the United States."

Combine "at-will" employment with such additional conditions as (among others) a significant decline in union employees, judges increasingly likely to tilt toward management, an increase toward company political partisanship, and longer work hours w/the Internet at hand, and the net result is that our glorious marketplace of ideas is lately more often the kind of place where if you value your job, you'll want to watch what you say, and to whom you say it. Of course, anyone may contest a termination and push it toward settlement or courtroom - but the individual (possibly still minus a paycheck) will be squaring off against Goliath, and Goliath's well-paid lawyers.

Dr. Barry has performed a much needed job in rounding up so concisely the many loose strands that circumscribe America's environment for free speech. But he also done something else: in Speechless, he broadly and brightly illuminates areas of our lives as Americans that have slipped deeper into the shadows, where essential protections have begun to drop off and in some cases, no longer even exist. And it is only with this knowledge that we can begin to reclaim what we are losing.

SPEECHLESS is a key acquisition
SPEECHLESS: THE EROSION OF FREE EXPRESSION IN THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE is a top pick for college-level business libraries, addressing issues of freedom of speech from legal, managerial and ethical perspectives and examining how the legal system affects employee speech rights and employer workplace management alike. From office politics and political correctness to protection for expression and how and why free speech works, SPEECHLESS is a key acquisition not just for business holdings, but for libraries strong in American politics and civil rights issues.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch