University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository
Abstract
In recent years, whistleblowers have been praised as heroes by onlookers and in the media for bravely unveiling wrongdoing by their employers, but whistleblowers have not always enjoyed this white-hat status. These private employees expose themselves to serious risks of backlash and retaliation from their employers, historically without any guaranteed protection from Congress or their respective state legislatures. Decades-old social norms and corporate culture prioritized loyalty from employees. They allowed employers to fire employees who spoke out against the company and even blackball them from their respective industries. With blind loyalty or termination being the only options for employees witnessing wrongdoing within their company, silence was the norm. Over the last few decades, Congress has increasingly recognized the public importance of protecting these whistleblowers and has enacted more than two dozen statutes mandating protection from retaliation in a wide variety of industries, with more than half the states following suit
