In the times we are living in it might not be that easy to find a job and especially one that you got educated for. Thus, when a job opportunity comes up we seem to accept it no matter the consequences – after all, we need that money for the basic living needs and to take care of our family. Saying this, it is not a rare case that an employee is harassed by the employer in multiple ways yet employees are scared to publicly speak out taking into consideration the possible consequences that might occur.
A lot of companies in the USA have started emploring the non-disclosure agreements as a must, and nowadays these are a part of many employment contracts, and in case of letting go an employee, these are included in severance packages as well. And though NDA was officially made up to protect the valuable information about certain companies, the business owners now misuse it to silence the workers.
Img source: medium.comHow Are The Workers Silenced Through An NDA
Taking a look at the Blind an anonymous social network for the workplace platform forum we can see numerous of posts where employees or former employees are asking about their rights to speak out although they signed an NDA. The thing is, people are scared they might be losing a job if they say anything about the misconducts that are occurring in a certain company, and in an even worse case be prosecuted for breaking the agreement.
As mentioned above, some companies even go as far to make the NDA a part of a severance package – and that is what happened to one woman a few months ago. As she claims she was let go of the company without any specified reason, and she had to sign the agreement in order to get the severance. The thing is, she was sexually harassed few months before and she thinks that it was one of the reasons that employee let her go at the end and she remained jobless. Now, she wants to speak up in front and tell everyone what happened, but she is scared to be prosecuted for breaking the NDA that she signed as a part of the severance package.
With this in mind, the before mentioned Blind conducted a survey wanting to get information on the number of tech workers that were actually silenced by an NDA. And the results were fascinating – only 15% said they were silenced by an NDA, while more than 50% were open to speaking up and the remaining were undefined. If we take these results as relevant information, we can conclude that the NDA, fortunately, isn’t that strong and that luckily these can’t be as misused as the business owners would maybe want to.
Still, if we look at the percentage of workers silenced by a certain company, we can see that Tesla has the highest 30% result. On the other hand, the LinkedIn is somewhere at around 7% which is the lowest out there. Companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and Facebook are at around 15%.
Apart from the Tesla result, it is good to see that the workers are still open to speaking about possible misconducts and they are not at the risk of losing their job in case they do so.
Summary
In the end, transparency is one of the most important things when it comes to running a business, so while NDA is good to keep valuable information inside a company, it isn’t something that should be misused to keep the workers silenced once harassment occurs.
