Employers Coercing Workers into Signing their Rights to Privacy Away

dublin | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis Wednesday April 30, 2008 00:24 by No One's Business by Mine

Violation of Worker's Right to Privacy

A personal account of how my right to privacy was signed away by the act of simply signing my employment contract:

Recently, I obtained a job as a secretary and signed an employment contract which I later read in detail and discovered to my shock and amazement a clause in it which stated that by signing this employment contract to obtain this job, I was consenting to the collection of sensitive personal data about me by the firm and to its release and disclosure to ‘interested third parties’, with no specific mention whatsoever as to the use to be made of my sensitive personal data. The details sought by the firm include:

details of my sex life - how on Earth are they going to obtain this?
details of my political views;
my medical history;
information on Trade Union membership;
information on my religious and philosophical beliefs, amongst other inappropriate requests.

I cannot see how the above is relevant information to my employment as a secretary. Also, I find this request to seek out sensitive personal data about me a gross violation of my right to privacy and should, in my opinion, be a breach of the Irish Data Protection Acts, due to the excessiveness of the information sought. I’m annoyed with myself that I signed the contract without reading it in detail, I should have known better, but I needed a job and I’m infuriated that a company would obtain consent to seeking such information by using such unfair coercive means and then claim I consented to it all by my simple act of signing the employment contract to obtain a badly needed job, in other words - sign your right to privacy away or you have no job!

I wonder if anyone else out there has experienced a similar nuisance clause in their employment contract. I would be interested to hear from other workers who have had similar experiences, particularly, with regard to responses they received to complaints they had made. It would be interesting to find out how common this is.

I have gone onto the Data Protection web site and apparently, as my circumstances stand, I’m now entitled to the following rights:

- the right to object;
- the right to rectification or erasure;
- the right to know for what purpose my personal data will be used;
- the right to be informed of what third parties have received or will receive my sensitive personal data;
- the right to block certain uses, etc.

I realise now, I may have weakened my rights somewhat by signing the bloody employment contract in the first place, but by objecting now I hope the rights above are open to me, although I won’t hold my breath as I recall it stated in one sentence of the contract, that by signing this contract, I’m consenting to the use and release and disclosure of all sensitive private data held about me - which leaves me red faced with fury. I will be notifying them in writing of my objections, so fingers-crossed they will be decent about it - if not, I’ll be seeking both advice and employment elsewhere.

In my opinion, it is grossly unfair of employers to obtain such sensitive personal data about employees when it has nothing to do with the job the employee will be employed to do. I believe acquiring such sensitive personal data on an employee is a gross violation of the privacy of the worker and employees should object to such intrusiveness and the coercive acts of such employers.

Related link: http://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Home/4.htm