I spent years as an on-air contributor at the Fox News Channel, so I was less than surprised when conservative media, always on the look-out for a new battle to juice up ratings, latched on to what it quickly termed liberal “cancel culture.”
To hear this narrative unfold, the supposed leftist assault on Dr. Seuss, Pepé Le Pew, Mr. Potato Head and other bastions of our halcyon youth will consign a generation of children to reading Das Kapital while drinking organic hemp milk from their sippy cups. But in the reality-based community, it is the very policies that these media companies and so many other organizations employ that have canceled the careers of millions of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community and other traditionally disenfranchised employees.
Today, one in three American workers is bound by a non-disclosure agreement. These confidentiality provisions, which were originally intended to protect proprietary information like the secret formula of Coca-Cola, are now widely used to prevent workers from discussing toxic workplace issues like sexual harassment, misogyny and gender and racial discrimination. Too often, these clauses are buried in employment and consulting contracts, binding prospective workers to silence from their first day on the job.
Practically speaking, NDAs allow organizations to sideline employees simply for complaining about workplace toxicity and then force those employees into perpetual silence about the circumstances surrounding their departure. Meanwhile, the organizations are free to spin whatever false narrative they want about the employee’s departure, which they often do to protect the predators in their midst.
The result is easy to guess: toxic men are protected, while survivors are silenced, unable to tell prospective employers about why they really left their previous job. It is the survivor who is so often canceled professionally, forever muzzled by a contract she or he never understood could be so broadly used. Short of filing a public lawsuit—an expensive proposition that further labels an employee a “troublemaker”—there is no recourse.
Other silencing mechanisms also exist to keep workers from exposing wrongdoing. More than 60 million Americans are bound by forced arbitration agreements, which mandate that those with complaints go into a secret chamber where their fates are typically decided by men who look very much like the men who are accused of wrongdoing. Arbitrators are aware that ruling in favor of an organization can often mean repeat business. Even if an arbitrator rules on behalf of the complainant—and that is rarely the case—silencing clauses prevent the public from ever learning about the wrongdoing. At best, the survivor gets a check to go away, along with a confidentiality provision that prohibits her from sharing why she left her previous job with prospective employers.
At Lift Our Voices, the organization I co-founded to eradicate these pernicious silencing mechanisms, we have heard from countless women who report that they are unable to find a new job after being relegated to forced arbitration or signing an NDA. After all, it is almost impossible to explain to a prospective employer why you left your previous job if you are legally prohibited from telling your story.
It is no surprise that men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and others continued to thrive in their careers even as the women they allegedly victimized were often forced into arbitration or summarily shuffled off with strict NDAs. The careers of those women that were canceled long before the predators were held to account.
Few executives and politicians have taken responsibility for silencing workers who dare speak up about workplace toxicity. Media companies that employ NDAs and forced arbitration often shout loudest about free speech and cancel culture. Progressive leaders repeatedly talk about how much they do for women without ever acknowledging the harm they inflict by enforcing silencing mechanisms that protect toxic men at the expense of those who should have been protected from them.
Before we cry about consigning an incel cartoon skunk to the trash heap of history, we should focus on the real-life plight of the millions of workers whose careers are canceled simply because they dare ask for a less awful professional environment. And until we eradicate the twin pandemics of forced arbitration and NDAs for toxic workplace issues, we should not be surprised that very few women and people of color rise to the top of corporate and political America.
