Author Description

Pressed to come up with a list of critical issues facing the contemporary American workplace, one thinks quickly of job insecurity, stagnant wages, health care costs, downsizing, offshoring, workplace safety, and retirement worries. Freedom of expression for employees might seem less urgent than these issues, but it is precisely the freedom to speak about these and other issues at the intersection of work, economy, democracy, and society that is at stake. Thirty years ago, David Ewing of the Harvard Business School condemned the U.S. system of employment as a ''black hole'' in our civil liberties universe, ''with rights so compacted, so imploded by the gravitational forces of legal tradition, that, like the giant black stars in the physical universe, light can scarcely escape.'' Today, as we will see in the chapters to come, employers are controlling workers and their lives on and off the job just as much, if not more than, they did thirty years ago. The result for employees is an erosion of freedom to express themselves, an impairment of their ability to participate fully as citizens in our collective social and political enterprise. --- INTRODUCTION, Speechless at Work in America