Celebrate National Whistleblower Day on July 30
By • July 29, 2024 0 383
On Tuesday, July 30 from 12 to 4 p.m., The National Whistleblower Center (NWC) will celebrate the 11th annual National Whistleblower Day on Capitol Hill in the Kennedy Caucus Room. Speakers for this year’s celebration will include Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR)—the co-chairs of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus—among a myriad of whistleblowers and legal advocates.
Every summer since 2013, National Whistleblower Day has been recognized on July 30—a date chosen because the first protective whistleblower law in the United States was unanimously signed into law on this day in 1778. National Whistleblower Day is a time to commemorate the bravery of whistleblowers across all industries who have made the courageous choice to speak out against corruption in pursuit of accountability and justice.
Attorneys Stephen M. Kohn, Michael D. Kohn, and David K. Colapinto—partners at the law firm Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, the top whistleblower law firm in the world—founded the NWC in 1988. After electrician Joe Macktal blew the whistle on Halliburton Brown & Root (HB&R) for attempting to cover up the safety concerns he identified at the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto created the NWC to advocate for Macktal and civilians like him who were willing to put everything on the line to expose misconduct. In the 36 years since its founding, the NWC has helped pass protective legislation such as the Dodd-Frank Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.
Siri Turner, the Executive Director at the NWC, will speak at this year’s National Whistleblower Day celebration alongside NWC co-founder and Chairman Stephen Kohn. Turner attended law school at Northeastern University, a public interest law school where she learned about the tremendous impact that whistleblowers have on safeguarding the future of our nation.
“I think that whistleblowers are critical to the wellbeing of our society and our economy,” Turner said in an interview with The Georgetowner. “Where there is wrongdoing, unless someone is willing to speak up, that wrongdoing will go unabated and people will get away with things that ultimately compound on top of each other. It starts in one place, but if nobody speaks up, it’ll grow, so whistleblowers are the ones who really prevent further harms from happening and they do it at their own expense. The nervousness around speaking up is natural—it’s completely understandable—so we really need to value whistleblowers because it is not guaranteed that someone will speak up. In fact, it’s more likely that nobody will speak up.”
On National Whistleblower Day, Turner is especially excited for attendees to hear from Lindsey Gulden, a geoscientist who blew the whistle on multinational gas and oil corporation ExxonMobil.
“At one point, Exxon was actively recruiting employees and telling them that they were gonna be part of improvements to the extractive industries that Exxon plays such a huge role in, but in fact they were being recruited to kind of participate in greenwashing and to create this illusion that Exxon is doing better,” Turner said. “In Lindsey Gulden’s case, she was a person who was responsible for evaluating the statistical likelihoods of being able to extract certain amounts of oil, and she found that the higher-ups were making misrepresentations of the data, so she spoke up about that and was continuously told that she was just wrong and didn’t know what she was talking about.”
“She decided to take action and report the issue, drawing the connection between misrepresentations of the data and investor confidence—when you are telling investors that you are able to extract a certain amount of oil in a certain amount of time, that is going to impact their investment decisions and, when that information is inaccurate, then you’re misleading investors,” Turner continued. “Lindsey spoke up about that and faced retaliation. She was terminated from her job. The OSHA judges at the Department of Labor granted her preliminary reinstatement, meaning she was able to go back to work.”
“However, Exxon has refused to honor that preliminary reinstatement order, so she’s currently in court fighting to have that order recognized so that she can go back to work, or at least obtain the missed pay that she has been without since that order was instituted,” Turned added. “Lindsey is really interesting, because she has been aggressively pursuing justice in court and has been really courageously fighting against Exxon but at the same time has been publicly speaking out about her whistleblower experience and what it was like at Exxon and sharing her values of climate protection, using this platform as a whistleblower to help raise awareness about the value whistleblowers bring to climate protections and holding extractive industry leaders accountable for misconduct.”
While National Whistleblower Day will not be livestreamed, video recordings of all speeches will be available for later viewing on the National Whistleblower Center YouTube channel. In addition to supporting whistleblowers by attending National Whistleblower Day, civilians can also support the NWC’s anti-corruption work by attending their fundraising trivia nights at Sudhouse DC and by checking out their list of Current Action Alerts.
