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Last updated on January 20th, 2025.
As the first book I’ve read in 2025, “Working for the Brand” sets an intimidatingly high bar for the rest of the year. A local Melburnian lawyer, Josh Bornstein, has written a meticulously researched exposé that shines a bright, cutting, and revealing floodlight onto how corporations and other organizations sacrifice individuals at the altar of brand protection.
Bornstein brings both legal expertise and moral clarity to examining how corporations systematically suppress employee speech – and behaviour – while demanding absolute loyalty to hopelessly vague and contradictory values and contractual clauses designed to trap. The hypocrisy is staggering – organizations that loudly champion free speech in public quietly muzzle their employees through expansive, subjective contract clauses that can change at a moment’s notice.
One of the most confronting aspects are the case studies where individuals faced severe consequences for merely expressing an opinion that proved unpopular in the wrong circles. Throughout the book, there are many instances where organizations abandoned basic ethics and sacrificed their people to online mob justice rather than risk brand damage. And those overt cases are only the tip of the iceberg – the broader damage to societies comes from the inhibition effect of impossibly vague and often self-contradictory rules employees are subjected to, up to and including signing off some basic human rights by virtue of signing an employment contract.
Many years ago, I also inadvertently dipped my toes into this pool as I received an urgent “cut it out”-call from the Comms department for live-tweeting facts at an industry conference. I did, at the time, cut it out, and reading about all these experiences makes me think I was simultaneously lucky and cowardly for doing so.
As the ridiculously high dog-ear index will tell you, there would be far more points to talk about here than I have room for here. In technical terms, it’s all just quite fucked-up.
One disturbing facet is how this corporate misbehavior represents another thread in the unraveling of democratic discourse. When organizations can effectively control not just their employees’ work speech but their entire public (and sometimes even private) presence, we’ve crossed a dangerous line. The fact that these restrictions are often enforced through vague concepts like “bringing the organization into disrepute” makes them even more pernicious.
I’d like to say this book is a warning about the future of free speech, but it’s more of an alarm of a situation where that’s already been dramatically curtailed. No matter your primary role in our society, Bornstein’s points demand attention.
* Rating: 5 out of 5
* Dog-ear index: 15.6 + 14 secondary bottom-corner dog ears, which is frankly getting a little ridiculous. Could’ve just as well dog-eared the whole thing.
* Who is it for: everyone? There’s no getting around the fact that the issues talked about here touch all of us.