Where were the melamine whistle blowers?

Source: The Wall Street Journal

When Texas nurse Anne Mitchell accused a doctor of unethical conduct, she had no idea how much trouble was in store. First of all, her complaint was anonymous, and second, she believed she was doing the right thing. When she was accused of harassment and faced a ten-year prison term, her reaction, according to the New York Times, was: “It was surreal. … I said how can this be? You can’t go to prison for doing the right thing.”

The relationship between nurses – a predominantly female occupation – and doctors – still dominated by males in the more highly paid specialties – has not always been an easy one. Nurses have less power, not to mention fewer financial resources, which makes it less safe to blow the whistle.

There are many occupations and circumstances in which whistle blowing would be an appropriate and ethical action, and yet it doesn’t happen. A lot of people knew full well what was going on at Enron. The tobacco industry at its worst, and the pharmaceutical industry today, avoids whistle blowing largely because employees learn to adopt the culture of their industry. They’re comfortably embedded in the social community of their workplace.
(For an interesting discussion of how this works in the pharmaceutical industry, see the post “The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine” and the extensive comments on this post at Pharmalot.)

Honor among thieves

Sometimes whistle blowing doesn’t happen because there’s intimidation from the top. In the case of melamine in milk, for example, the Chinese government went to great lengths to prevent information from becoming public. According to Paul Midler, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

Chinese journalists have been warned not to report details surrounding milk cases. Parents of children sickened by melamine-tainted products who have attempted to organize themselves to protest or seek compensation risk being sent to jail for “social disruption.”

At the root of the problem in China, according to Midler, may be a very strong aversion to being a whistle blower:

In China, workers are too afraid to report even the most obvious production errors or the most egregious cases of unethical misconduct. Working with many factories, I have seen line operators reluctant to report anything at all. Managers ignore issues that might cause embarrassment. Everyone involved is making a risk calculation, determining that staying silent reduces the likelihood of trouble, at least in the short run. Where workers ought to speak up, the inclination is to look the other way instead.

Midler’s WSJ article was called “Why China Keeps Poisoning the Milk.” In the comments following the article, a reader, Greg Arnot, posted an interesting answer:

The reason is simple. … Under Mao’s Liberals, business people were maligned decade after decade.
At the same time, those who thrived under Mao did so by playing politics in a Klingon like system were power went to the most ruthless, not the most honest. The Chinese people were taught that the path to success was to be ruthless and dishonest.
So, when Deng Xiao Ping said to let businesses exist, when he said “it is good to become rich”, there was no culture of honest business dealings.
In the mid-1980s, I taught a class to young Party members, and I used the example of a tomato farmer. … If we say all tomato farmers are evil, all are dishonest; if we say that all tomato farmers are bad people, then the only people who will become tomato farmers are those who do not mind having a bad reputation.

And if there’s honor among thieves, there won’t be any whistle blowers.

Related posts:
Justice triumphs for whistle-blowing Texas nurse
Whistle blowing: Nurse Anne Mitchell vs. Dr. Arafiles
The persistence of melamine