This month, a new educational video series was released that explains how non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are often misused to cover up racism and discrimination in the workplace. The Canadian/UK advocacy group Can’t Buy My Silence collaborated with the Canada-based BIPOC Academic Coalition on this “Racism and NDAs” video series, which centres on the stories of individuals who these practices have directly harmed and people working against such misuse of NDAs.
CBMS is a global campaign pushing for legislation and regulation to end the misuse of NDAs to settle cases of sexual misconduct, racism, pregnancy discrimination and other human rights violations. The CBMS team has been working with governments in Canada, the UK, the Republic of Ireland and Australia and has created two pledges—one for businesses and one for universities—to sign on to ending their misuse while legislation is forthcoming. So far, four Canadian universities have signed the pledge, including three in Nova Scotia: Acadia University, the Atlantic School of Theology and the University of King’s College.
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BIPOC Academic Coalition is an advocacy group whose vision is to support BIPOC academics in all stages of their careers and “disrupt the status-quo through education, activism and research and foster awareness in Canadian society that their public universities lower the quality of research, community service and teaching through systemic racism.”
Two videos in the “Racism and NDAs” series are available on YouTube so far, and more will be added soon.
The first video was released on Dec 10, International Human Rights Day. It features Jason MacLean, who worked for Corrections Canada for 10 years before becoming president of the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union. MacLean now serves as treasurer and secretary of NSGEU. His union authored one of two resolutions that passed unanimously at the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour’s annual convention in November 2023, to lobby the provincial government to end the use of NDAs in cases of workplace sexual harassment, discrimination and other abuses.
In the video, MacLean shares his own experience of discrimination in the workplace, the outcome of his lengthy complaint process and his reaction to being asked to sign an NDA, which he was told was “just standard” and just something that’s done.
MacLean says he wanted to talk about what had happened and the discrimination he’d faced to improve the workplace “because if you were to cover it up, you’d never have to do anything.
“I lived with this discrimination for ten years,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been made to feel that way. I had to hold that for all that time and it almost turned me into a different person…and other people don’t need to feel that way.”
The second video in the series was released on Dec 19, International Migrants Day. It features Deepa Mattoo, the executive director of the Barbara Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto, which provides assistance and support to women and gender-diverse people experiencing violence. Mattoo shares her experiences with migrant workers who have been pressured to sign NDAs to cover up harassment, discrimination and other abuses—or even as a first condition of precarious employment with poor working conditions. Mattoo says these NDAs are often tied to very low sums of money, are full of “defects” and “unrealistic…almost illegal conditions” and are used to exploit a worker’s vulnerabilities.
For marginalized people, racialized people or people who lack access to resources, such as vulnerable workers and migrant workers, says Mattoo, “when they are offered these ‘sham agreements’…the reality of their immigration status plays a huge role in that power imbalance—which is that someone looking at them knows ‘this person doesn’t have a lot of control over their immigration status, I will ask them to sign this and, if they don’t sign it, I will come up with some other ways to exert my control.’”
Mattoo offers advice on what can and should be done to end NDA misuse in the cases of migrant and precarious workers. She gives her thoughts, including a recommendation to lawyers to learn how to respond to clients with precarious status being asked to sign NDAs with overreaching conditions and impositions, especially if NDAs extend their terms to other countries.
“Another really important thing is to think about what kind of awareness can we spread in communities which are ethno-specific and speak different languages around this issue,” asks Mattoo.
“We need this to be done in multiple languages. We need this to be done in multiple spaces with ethno-specific communities so that they can actually engage with this topic. She adds, “we need to figure out awareness campaigns that can inform migrant workers of their rights and the resources available to them—if they can access them.”
As of now, the CBMS group offers NDA-informed training and educational resources on its website, in French and English for those who can access it, to learn more about the pervasiveness and harms of NDA misuse. These resources also include information for those asked to sign an NDA.
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This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.