Whistleblowing – an extension of working life democracy? The case of Norway

Abstract

Working life relations are in a continuous state of change. So are the institutions of working life democracy. In Norway, three well-established components of working life democracy have been in place since the 1960s and 1970s, developing along different institutional tracks: collective bargaining at the national level, employee representation on the boards, and employee participation in protection of health and safety in the work environment. From 2007, legal protection of whistleblowing was included in the Working Environment Act (WEA), anchored in specific institutional arrangements. Before the turn of the century, a common assumption was that whistleblowing mainly targets irregular, even criminal, dispositions of the enterprise. After the inclusion in the WEA, data from Norway from the years 2016 to 2022 demonstrate that to a large extent, psycho-social problems have become the object of whistleblowing. However, institutional specificities limit the handling of social interaction problems by the traditional work environment arrangements. Against the background of its separate institutions for the handling of grievances, it is argued that whistleblowing, along with freedom of expression, are parts of a fourth track of democratization. Even though the institutional setup of whistleblowing has been revised twice since 2007, the findings indicate that additional revisions are still desirable.