The Ethics of Mockery

We’ve talked about the ethics of free speech in this space before – and as far as I can tell, the issue remains unsettled. On the one hand, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, which by extension includes things written on websites and posted on Twitter and shared with the world. But, on the other hand, some kinds of speech are not protected under the First Amendment (notably hate speech, inciting people to violently overthrow the government, and certain other criminal acts), and it probably isn’t reasonable to expect a company to continue employing someone who is deliberately mocking them on various Internet channels. All other points aside, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who is that dedicated to making the company look bad is really putting forth his or her best efforts on the job. However, all of those discussions only consider the company’s side of the issue; I also have to ask about the ethics of mocking your employer in the first place…

In the recent American Airlines case, the company fired an employee who not only mocked them online, but was actually recording You Tube videos making fun of company policy, internal communications, and possibly senior personnel. American says he was publishing confidential information such as passenger itineraries and their ex-employee says he wasn’t, but the basic issue in the case is whether the company has the right to fire this flight attendant for refusing to stop his electronic mockery. The employee claims that his attacks were a response to patronizing internal communications from senior management, and were influenced directly by the absurdly bad morale created by the current management team, although it is not clear if the campaign had any impact on either the morale issues or the failures in management. And even assuming that such messages made the employees feel better and cut down on poor communications (or bad judgment) on the part of senior management, there’s no indication that these attacks provided any benefit to either party…

On the other side of the issue, it seems likely that the damage to the company’s public relations (the You Tube videos have each had tens of thousands of views; collectively they could have been seen by hundreds of thousands of potential customers) will have a negative impact on the company’s profits, which has the potential to eliminate jobs, prevent wage increases or improvements in benefits, lower stockholder value, and negatively impact all of the vendors who supply the airline and their stakeholders as well. If the value being lost by American Airlines was being recovered by the employees we could argue that it represented compensation for the insults and/or injuries being inflicted by senior management, but it’s hard to see how anyone is benefitting from this arrangement…

Ultimately, senior management at American might elect to rectify the errors being mocked online, and if it does so then it is also possible that the company’s operations will improve (by means of improved employee morale, if nothing else) and profitability may rise. But unless the management team is both willing and able to find the lessons in these online references and implement meaningful changes, then all that has happened is that lot of otherwise innocent people will have lost their jobs, their quality of living, or their investments, for no benefit to anyone. All of which leads me to an obvious question: does a disgruntled employee have any responsibility to his or her coworkers, stockholders, vendors of the company, or anyone else to try to maintain a good company image? Or do they have the right to trash the organization, even though this is far more likely to damage these stakeholders than it is to inconvenience the company executives whom they are mocking in the first place?

It’s worth thinking about…