Protect the whistleblowers

When the shortages of gowns and other personal protective equipment during the depths of last year’s COVID onslaught had doctors and nurses complaining about having to resort to wearing garbage bags, the heroic medical professionals were threatened by their employers with being fired for exposing the truth.

So last spring the Legislature properly changed New York Labor Law 741, which shields health care whistleblowers, to ensure caregivers wouldn’t be fired if they spoke out publicly about workplace conditions, so long as they had reasonable belief those conditions were either dangerous or illegal.

Yet the same protections aren’t afforded to other private sector employees — people like Chris Smalls, the former Amazon warehouse worker who was canned shortly after speaking out about the retail giant’s COVID poor safety practices.

New York’s main whistleblower law requires employees pass a two-part test to be safeguarded from termination and retaliation for tattling on their bad bosses and colleagues. First, the policy or practices in question must both violate the law and pose substantial risk to public safety. Plus, the onus falls on the complaining employee to prove that the practice violates the law. That doesn’t make any sense and needs to be updated. Just because a workplace condition is unsafe doesn’t necessarily mean it’s also already illegal.

In fact, many new laws proposed to better protect workers and consumers originate from whistleblowers publicizing dangerous practices that should be unlawful, but aren’t. Another change would eliminate requiring complaints allege both violations of law and unsafe conditions. Either should suffice.

And employees, who often lack access to company records and data, shouldn’t have to conclusively prove illegality on their own. The law should be changed to mirror that imposed on healthcare workers, who’re only required to have a reasonable belief the practice they’re speaking up about is illegal or unsafe. We really doubt that there was a law on the books last year specifically barring using Hefty bags as surgical gowns. But it sure was wrong.