Josh Bornstein, Working for the Brand: How corporations are destroying free speech, Scribe, 2024.
On 20 December 2013, Justine Sacco, a public relations executive for InterActiveCorp, was passing through Heathrow on a flight from New York to Cape Town when she tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!’
Sacco hails from a white South African family that supported the African National Congress and her tweet was an exercise in satire – a satirical comment on white privilege and the insular bubble white Americans live in ( ‘Only an insane person would think that white people don’t get Aids,’ she later told writer Jon Ronson).[1] But her joke landed badly. By the time her flight touched down the tweet had gone viral, she was being universally vilified as a racist and an online mob was demanding her employer sack her. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,’ wrote one vigilante. Sacco’s company swiftly and very publicly complied, sacking her and righteously condemning the ‘hateful statements’ she made in her tweet (15-16).
In his powerful new book, Working for the Brand: how corporations are destroying free speech, labour-relations lawyer Josh Bornstein recounts Sacco’s story and argues that at the heart of such destructive maelstroms is what he calls ‘corporate cancel culture’. He acknowledges the much-discussed role online mobs and social media play in instances where individuals are shamed, sacked and blacklisted, but his main concern is the immense and repressive control 21st-century corporations (including universities and media outlets) exercise over their employees – at work and beyond. As he writes: ‘It’s difficult to conceive of a democratic nation-state possessing anything like the power corporations have over their employees’ (p. 31).
In the wake of the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of the union movement, the corporation works, in the words of US philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, as a form of ‘private government’ that has ‘arbitrary, unaccountable power over those it governs’. (p.32). Here citizens can be compelled to take drug tests, are monitored by digital tracking devices, can be docked for ‘time theft’ for exchanging casual remarks at work and have the duration of toilet breaks limited. Inside and outside the workplace all sorts of employee activities have become the subject of policing – from political social media posts and strike signs, to jokes and consensual sexual relations.
At the same time, corporations have put enormous resources into brand management and ‘ethics washing’ to promote themselves as responsible corporate citizens committed to climate and social justice (i.e. the good guys who can regulate themselves). This ostensibly justifies companies’ control, censorship and punishment of workers’ behaviour and speech. Bornstein draws on his own experience as an employment lawyer in Australia as well as examples from Britain and the United States to illustrate the devastating effects of corporate cancel culture.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Working for the Brand is the number of these tales that are unfamiliar. Take the case of Henk Doevendans. A machine operator who worked for BHP Coal Pty Ltd for over twenty years, Doevendans was a union member and delegate. In 2012, when attempts to negotiate a new collective agreement had stalled, the union took protected industrial action. BHP responded by bringing in scab labour. Doevendans and other workers protested outside Saraji Mine in Queensland, waving a variety of signs, including one that read: ‘No principles. SCABS. No guts’.
BHP sacked Doevendans, successfully arguing that his strike sign breached the Workplace Conduct policy, the company’s Charter of Values, and ‘expected workplace behaviours’ which required employees ‘always demonstrate courtesy and respect’ (p.253).
Other cases are more familiar. Bornstein acted for SBS sports journalist Scott Macintyre who was sacked in the wake of tweets critical of ANZAC day that sparked a social media pile-on. The ante was upped by the Murdoch media which drew in then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull to pressure SBS to sack McIntyre. A few years later Bornstein appeared to switch gears, disarming parts of the left when he criticised the sacking of evangelical Rugby star Israel Folau, dismissed by Rugby Australia for posting homophobic comments that created a media furore. For Bornstein, the common denominator in these cases is that ‘determining complex moral and philosophical issues, including the bounds of acceptable speech, should not be the remit of corporations, but rather the role of democratically elected politicians’ (66).
Bornstein persuasively argues that this is the issue that too often goes missing or is ignored in debates about freedom of speech and cancel culture. Free speech is being destroyed less by right-wing reactionaries or censorious progressives (he is critical of both), than by the draconian restrictions placed on the activities and speech of workers by their employers. These are concretised in employment contracts that are so artfully imprecise and vague that employees cannot possibly know the bounds of the regulations they’ve signed up to – until they’re accused of breaching them.
This analysis of how corporate forces muzzle free speech and undermine democracy is one facet of a larger critique of the extraordinary, unchecked power exercised by corporations. I say extraordinary, but, as Bornstein points out, we’ve been here before. In the late nineteenth century booming corporations in Britain and the US wielded similar power, fiercely resisting taxation and government regulation and running roughshod over workers – providing pitiful wages and conditions and sacking workers if they were injured or protested. The author reprises the story of how this changed: of how employees fought back in the 20th century, achieving greater bargaining power and ‘a measure of industrial democracy’ by forging unions and obtaining political power and legislative reform (39) (this version of the story does not dwell on the fact that for much of the 20th century the employees who benefited from the labour movement were predominantly white men).
But it didn’t last. From the 1980s, neoliberal policies and a raft of anti-union legislation decimated the movement – notably in Australia (about 50% of the Australian workforce were union members in the early 1980s whereas today it’s about 12.5%). Given this historical context, Bornstein sees a revival of unionisation as the way to rein in corporate power and restore employees’ rights to free speech. Ultimately the book’s central tenet – that ‘The battle for democracy at work is intimately connected with the broader democratic struggle’ (265) – is compelling. Working for the Brand offers an illuminating analysis of labour relations and cultural developments that manages to re-focus debates about free speech and democracy: it cuts through much of the sound and fury of the culture wars and has the potential to transform the terms of discussion.
Caitlin Mahar
Swinburne University of Technology
[1] Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Picador, 2016, 68.
