The UK government is being urged to change the law to combat the use of “gagging clauses” to silence victims of sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination in the workplace.
Maria Miller, a Conservative MP, will introduce a 10-minute rule bill on Tuesday that would stop the use of non-disclosure agreements from being used to cover up illegal activity.
“When used unethically, NDAs are catastrophically damaging to innocent parties, and immoral because they are being used as safety nets for employers to routinely cover up abuses without consequence,” she said.
“The evidence also shows it takes a huge personal toll on victims, leaving them emotionally and psychologically drained, disillusioned, and left with a total loss of faith in the legal system.”
NDAs have long been used by companies and powerful individuals to protect corporate secrets or sensitive information. But increasingly they have been employed as a means of silencing victims and witnesses from speaking out on abuse at work.
Successive consultations since 2017, including a government report, have concluded that action should be taken to protect employees from toxic gagging clauses. But so far ministers have failed to enact new laws or update sanctions on lawyers who draft unethical agreements.
The government said: “We have held a thorough consultation on the misuse of confidentiality clauses between workers and their employers and committed to implementing legislation to crack down on these practices when parliamentary time allows.”
Miller will present the first reading of her private members’ bill, which has cross-party support, before parliament. The second reading is not scheduled until March 18 next year.
In the US, such restrictions are routinely bundled together with non-disparagement clauses that prevent workers from saying anything negative about their employers after they leave their job, creating a chilling effect on employees’ free speech.
The misuse of gagging clauses — sometimes called “hush agreements” — was brought to public attention by the #MeToo movement when a series of powerful and wealthy people were revealed to have attempted to silence victims of alleged sexual harassment.
Former assistant to disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, Zelda Perkins, broke her NDA in the Financial Times in 2017 to detail claims he had assaulted a colleague and harassed her, triggering a series of revelations against individuals including billionaire retailer Philip Green the following year.
Miller has been joined by other MPs, as well as legislators and campaigners in the US and Ireland who have been pushing to amend national laws to prevent gagging clauses from being used to cover up discrimination.
New laws have already been passed in recent years in California and New Jersey to protect sexual harassment victims, while draft legislation is being considered in Canada, Australia and Ireland.
“It is more than 20 years since I was coerced into signing an unethical NDA with Miramax to silence me about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault of a colleague,” Perkins said.
“It is now over four years since I broke this NDA to expose the legal problem to lawmakers, but nothing has changed and [they] continue to be misused.”
“That is why we have launched [a new] campaign because until . . . toxic NDAs are abolished, victims of sexual harassment, bullying, and other wrongdoing will continue to be silenced,” she added.