This workshop was "an admission that like all other human-centric organizations, we are susceptible to organizational silence simply because we are not perfect at communication, and that it creeps even in the loudest meetings, from a perception that it is safer to stay silent than to speak up, and that it plays an important role in our mission's success". It was acknowledging "Silence like a cancer grows" (Paul Simon).
We learned about different resources available to us to speak up and be heard when immediate superiors or team members do not listen to us. We are lucky now to work in a place with so many rules and trainings not only to protect whistle blowers but also to encourage them to do so. Little did I know about the stories behind our No Fear training, a mandatory training that federal employees are required to take every two years.
The story was very moving and powerful, especially when hearing it from its own protagonist while being with her in the same room. It was the story of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientist. She had learned that one of her agency's grantees (contractors), was spending their grant for mining in South Africa, and that their practices was poisoning, sickening, and killing local people and ruining the environment there due to unsafe use and handling of a chemical called Vanadium. She learned about a problem to say the least, she reported it to her supervisor. She was told to shut up and not concern herself with such issues.
She performed her own investigation. We watched a movie of one of her trips to South Africa, interviewing local people. A widow telling the story of how quickly she lost her husband after him joining the mine, how current workers were seeing blood in their urine, eyes, or ears and how children and wives got sick and contaminated from washing workers' cloths or sleeping next to them. We learned that most people in that movie are now deceased.
She fought for five years, with a government agency who receives free lawyers from the department of justice. She first lost her high profile science project and eventually her job. She had to get loans and second mortgages on her house to afford attorneys. But she won. She won big. She won a lawsuit against EPA based on racial, sexual, and hostile work environment. After five years, NO FEAR ACT was signed into law in May 2002, the first Civil Right and whistle-blower law in 21st century, and the first civil rights bill that was passed unanimously in the house. Our protagonist is Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo the author of No Fear and founder of No Fear Coalition, and the world is a better place because of her.
She said that she wrote the book for five reasons: to fullfil a promise to South Africans that she will tell their story to the world, to challenge the culture of absue and silence that instills fear, to tell the story of the first passage of civil right law, to provide a guide and narrative so that when you take the NO FEAR training, you learn the sacrifices and the stories to give you these rights.
She reminded us that the goal is complete elimination of discrimination in federal government and that we should not confuse the tools to get to a goal with the goal itself (i.e. such laws, bills, and trainings are tools not the sign of no discrimination and abuse).
She is not done yet! She is going back to court to prove her job loss or firing was a retaliation act for her whistle blowing. It was so hard to believe that the conversations she has had with her superiors, the interactions, the threats she received, all happened just a few years ago in the U.S. I realized how lucky and fortunate I am to have not experienced such abuses and threats in my work place. I hope I never have to. However, if I have to, I know that there are laws protecting me, thanks to Dr. Coleman-Adebayo and people like her.
