ERC in the News

When Corina Allen was dismissed from her job by Radio One, which owns two local stations in Texas, in 2007, she knew she had a discrimination claim on her hands. While Texas is an “at will” state, meaning employees can be terminated without reason, something felt amiss. She filed complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and didn’t look back, accepting a position with CBS before ultimately opening her own advertising and media placement agency.

Lately we are all reeling from painful stories of alleged misconduct making headlines in American newspapers. Events at Penn State, the Dover Air Force Base mortuary, and the DEA's Operation Fast and Furious not only turned our attention to those either accused of or admitting to wrongdoing, but also on the people who blew (or didn't blow) the whistle.

Read complete article.

Last year, nearly 8.8 million Americans felt the sting of workplace retaliation — a 33% increase in negative payback from the year before. That surge, identified by the Ethics Resource Center in its biennial survey of ethics in the workplace, is an ominous trend that strongly suggests that ethics violations at U.S. companies are about to go up.

Read complete article.

The number of employees of major companies who claim to have witnessed illegal contributions to public officials is four times higher than it was two years ago, accoring to a new study from a business ethics watchdog group.

Read Complete Article.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s a case of correlation or causation, but according to a new study published this week, employees who are super active on social networking sites have a very different idea of what is appropriate workplace behavior than other workers.

Read Complete Article.

Download the report at www.ethics.org/nbes

The evidence that whistleblowers don't have adequate protections keeps piling up--in the last two years, there has been a sharp increase in retaliations against private employees who report wrongdoing, according to a study released yesterday by the Ethics Resource Center (ERC).  

Even though more workers are witnessing violations of company rules, they're feeling pressure not to say anything.

More employees than ever before turned whistleblower against unethical behavior last year, but they also suffered the highest amount of backlash in history from their bosses.

Employees saw less misconduct in 2011 than in previous years, but they’re increasingly reporting to others about it and facing heightened retaliation as a result, a survey found.

U.S. workers report mounting pressure to violate corporate policies, according to a survey by the nonprofit Ethics Resource Center that also showed retaliation against whistle-blowers reached a record level.

Demands on employees to ignore company policies, or even break the law, are approaching the highest level since 2000, just before corporate scandals led to laws combating violations, according to a report released today by the Arlington, Virginia- based group.