A question of policy

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1480150]

Note - by "public" here, I mean to people outside of the company, like journalists or similar, not openly to people inside of the company.

Comments

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

But Nutt isn't an employee.

[andrewducker]

This is a discussion I've been having with people at a tangent to that.

And if he's not an employee, how can he be sacked?

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

You can sack a consultant, can't you?

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

Yes definitely.

[andrewducker]

So, he was employed as a consultant?

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Well, I think technically he was employed as an advisor but surprisingly I've not seen any of the paperwork. If you question is really "is there a difference between being employed as a consultant and being employed as an employee?" then yes, of course there is.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

He isn't employed at all, at least not in a financial sense. Being a government special advisor is an unpaid position. He still holds his post as an academic and presumably gets paid for that. It should also be noted that he did not go running to a tabloid with his comments, they were taken from a paper he published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

I contend that the two positions are incompatible. An academic cannot only publish work that is in line with government policy whilst a government advisor apparently cannot publish anything that the government does not agree with.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Several things:

Government special advisers are paid, often very well paid.
SpAds also get to say things the government disagrees with; they're not civil servants and are not bound by the same rules as civil servants.
Many academics are in fact employed as civil servants; when this happens they tend to have discussions about getting a dispensation to continue to publish in their specialist areas.
A lot of them are employed as consultants anyway, in which case the rules covering civil servants don't entirely apply.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

According to the BBC, David Nutt's advisory position was unpaid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8334948.stm

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

There is a clash of terminology here. Special Advisors are something specific (essentially party apparatchiks) whereas (as I understand it) Nutt is just an advisor.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

He wasn't paid, but he was doing a job, and it is reasonable for his boss to relive him of responsibilities.

Johnson has been an arse, though.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

No, but it would probably result in a disciplinary.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, although I said yes I would actually just get a bollocking. It would end up in dismissal if I kept doing it though.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

And if I were speaking as an employee but also as a representative of my trade union, I can say pretty much what I like/what is expected of me, within reason.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

People have been dismissed for a single occurence. There are cases of people being dismissed for posting a single status update on Facebook.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

Where's your option for "I am my own employer"? :)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I've said 'yes and this is reasonable' -- but in fact the answer is 'no'. It is explicitly misconduct for civil servants to make statements in public of this kind (while identifying themselves as civil servants) and if you were outrageous enough about it you might be sacked. But in fact in most of the examples I can think of people were not actually sacked. A good example was the civil servant blogger a couple of years ago; a junior member of staff who caused a mild sensation and was given a severe dressing down, but kept their job. If I had done the same thing I would be at much greater risk of sackage because honestly, I should know better.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Badly framed question.

(I am my own employer, and I regularly play devil's advocate with myself in public.)

On the David Nutt thing: he's a scientist, on what is supposedly an advisory panel intended to feed unbiased scientific opinion into the Home Office's processes. He's not an employee but an external advisor whose credibility depends on the perception of his impartiality. Firing him for doing exactly what he's supposed to do, i.e. offering opinions impartially? Not clever: to external third parties it indicates that it is the Home Office that lacks impartiality (and common sense), not the advisor.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Also, having googled (I've been out of the country for three days); Chairmen of advisory councils are neither civil servants nor special advisors, and their roles are not 'jobs' in the sense that most people would think of them. There is also a considerable distinction between serving on advisory committee, and chairing one.

I think this Times comment piece is quite good: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6899953.ece

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I've enjoyed both your and a_pawson's comments on this.

I'm part of a network for young career researchers and policy makers. There does seem to be a system of research feeds into policy, but does not necessarily dictate policy. Policy is in turn decided by MPs who are trying to do the right thing by the public, the research, the past, the current climate (and possibly their future votes).

It seems like most people are doing their best in a tricky situations. I think invoking change can be very difficult.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's right. What I don't know, and haven't had the time to find out, is whether Nutt was saying 'research evidence shows that ecstasy is less dangerous than cigarettes, alcohol or horse riding' (hardly news; the first two are only legal due to historical precedent, and with the third we assume that sporting pursuits have benefits that outweigh their disadvantages, an accommodation we do not habitually make for recreational drugs), or 'Government policy is wrong-headed and I call for it to be changed', which is a bit of an odd stand for the chair of an advisory committee to take publicly.

[andrewducker]

The link to the publication from which the talks was made that akicif left in my latest post indicates that it was the former. I originally saw it portrayed in the media as the latter. Which explains where my confusion comes from. He doesn't seem to have crossed any lines at all, that I can see.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I've now read extracts (in the Guardian, which I found on a seat on the Victoria Line this evening) and he clearly overstepped the bounds. As other people have said, if you're on an advisory committee, you can speak freely in your private professional capacity, but you must state that you are not speaking as a member of the advisory committee. His lecture makes repeated reference to the work of the advisory committee and his role within it and it is entirely reasonable that people would interpret what he said as speaking in that capacity. Most of the content would be unexceptional if not for that, but there's also a patch in the lecture where he talks about the specious thinking of 'many people' and makes it clear that 'many people' includes politicians.

Should he have been forced to resign? A matter for the politicians I would think, though it doesn't appear to me that the issue is playing out particularly well for them at the moment.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I suspect I would - or rather, that I'd be subject to a disciplinary procedure that would, on repeat offences, lead to sacking. In my previous place, it was my job not to express my opinions *at* work, because I was meant to be gathering other people's opinions, but I was pretty much fine out of work.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I think it's unreasonable to be sacked on a first offence unless you are really burning your bridges. But it's all a bit qualatative and dependent on your job.

The David Nutt thing of course is totally different, but that's already been addressed here.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

One of my jobs would; the other two wouldn't. But universities tend not to care what their adjunct faculty/grad students have to say about them.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I had a friend who was working for a company that provided services to councils - basically popping in to give food and companionship to elderly folks. He told me that they were billing the council that he was spending 30 minutes with each client, but he was expected to visit 6 an hour (!) Now, he threatened to make this public and he was sacked. In my opinion the sacking was morally wrong. Was it reasonable? Well, it was consistent with rationality and financial success, but not with probity.

[andrewducker]

They were committing fraud, and therefore one would expect them to act badly no matter what. Legally speaking, I suspect that if he took them to court he'd win...

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Whisteblowers will always annoy employers, and whistleblowing is probably always careeer suicide unfortunately. I think it's very difficult to win these cases - and so many of them involve old people. I am not sure whether that's because oldsters get exploited most, or because exploiting them feels so bad that people are moved to protest. A bit of both perhaps: ruthless care home operators, and soft hearted carers.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm an academic, so have quite a broad leash for making whatever statements I like (within the law) so long as I make it clear they are my views not my employer's, and don't use their resources to do so.

If I was baselessly abusive about them - and managed to do so in a way that the powers that be actually noticed - I'd expect to get a bit of a hard time about it, but sacking me would take an awful lot of work. If I was them I'd just use management discretion to minimise the damage and make my life hard.

[andrewducker]

Academia are kind-of a special case - but if you had a university position (Head of Year or similar) then I suspect treatment would be rather different.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Probably not much different, unless you were making out that you were speaking with that hat on. You shouldn't be too surprised if it just so happens that someone else gets lined up for the hat, though.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I probably would get fired, and they'd probably be justified as my job entails hearing a lot of confidential information and publically airing grievances would likely compromise some of that. (Also, part of the company is publically-owned and I could be accused of stock manipulation depending upon what I said and how I aired my concerns.) If I managed to circumnavigate all those, I'd get a talking-to mainly for not bringing my concerns to the attention of either my boss (in most cases) or the internal "compliance hot line" (in case it was about misbehaviour by my boss or the issue wasn't being addressed) instead.

-- Steve's fortunate to have a fairly short decision chain and a boss with good ethics, so concerns get addressed rather quickly and he's not likely to have to "go public".

Re: question of policy

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

At least as long as I didn't try to say that I was representing my company. If I tried to pass myself off as a company rep and said such things then yes, I should lose my job. Heck if I say I'm a company rep and say things the company agrees with, I should lose my job...

Re: question of policy

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

Oh. Lack of context. Excuse the yank here.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

By 'wrong' do you mean inaccurate, morally reprehensible or that I disagree with it?

[andrewducker]

Any of the above.

Were you, for instance, to state on a blog or in an interview for a newspaper that you thought that something your employers did was dumb.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

Don't know about my current employer (an Incredibly Big Megacorporation ) but I'm not going to chance it. Previous employers (Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust) sacked a nurse/union leader, Karen Reissman, for publicly saying nursing staff hadn't had their legally mandated pay rise (which we hadn't) and for saying there weren't enough beds for the patients (which there weren't - we regularly had 21 patients on an 18-ward bed). Led to two years of legal fighting and several one-day strikes. I supported Reissman.

[andrewducker]

I definitely support whistleblowing on fraud, and legal protection for whistleblowers.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Legal protection including 'keeping your job'?

[chuma.livejournal.com]

If I was employed to give advice, and I gave that advice to the company and then repeated it in public, I would find it wholey unreasonable to be sacked.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. And that's what he seems to have done, which is fine. What I'd _read_ about him doing (originally) was to offer advice, and then complain that the government were doing things all wrong because they weren't following his advice, which is less fine.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

As a civil servant I've pretty much signed a contract that says I won't do this. We have a specific whistle-blowing policy, so if I think something is particularly wrong I should use that.

However, in the specific instance you're referring to, then no, he shouldn't have been sacked. He's there as an external advisor, not an employer.