The instruction to “Shut up and do your job” may cause HR types to shudder at its crassness, but at least it conveys a truth about employment, an area too often benighted by weasel words.
Paid work can be an avenue of personal expression. It can provide a platform to share one’s ideas, skills and talents with the world. What it rarely, if ever, does is encourage truly free speech, and almost by definition it limits our actions.
“If you haven’t got a problem, you haven’t got a job,” said the industrialist John Paul Getty. In other words, people are employed to solve employers’ problems. Can’t cook and serve customers? Employ a waiter or a chef. Jobs are defined by a limited set of tasks and skill requirements defined by an employer, constituency, or customer. In other words, it is highly unlikely that you will be ever employed to do whatever takes your fancy. Employment limits our actions.
Be careful what you say.Credit:
Employment also limits our freedom of expression. Increasingly this is written into employment contracts that have teeth. While we may be free to say whatever we like, we are not free of the consequences.
As private citizens there are limits on our expression which mostly prevent harm to others through incitement or vilification. However, once we become employed, those limits on expression increase substantially. Many employment contracts contain clauses forbidding any actions or expressions that bring the employer or even the occupation as whole into disrepute, or that are damaging to the interests of the employer. Even if it is done outside of work.
So merrily telling the world that the product or service your employer offers is total crap may feel liberating, but it could well involve you being liberated from your job.
It does not necessarily require an explicit employment contract for the consequences of our public utterances to be career-killing. Famously, many years ago, the CEO of a large jewellery company, Gerald Ratner, described one of his best-selling products as “crap”. He had to step down soon after.
The degree to which limits are placed on our freedom of expression varies by occupation. In some professions, there are very tight guidelines regarding how, for instance, diagnoses are made and described. Medical practitioners are not free to make up their own descriptors that disregard accepted frameworks, and are liable to significant penalties if they do.
