STORY 19
Signing an NDA with a large UK employer was the most isolating and difficult experience I’ve ever been through. It affects me to this day. At the time of signing, I was so distraught and so desperate to find a way out of a difficult situation that I’d no real understanding of how much the agreement itself would affect my confidence long term or how it would sever my contact with a community of colleagues I’d known for years.
My NDA relates to maternity discrimination and workplace bullying. I knew that, when I returned from maternity leave, I was going to face aggression from a manager. I’d seen it with other colleagues and there were so many comments during my own leave that the anger about my taking “time off” was abundantly clear, to the point that I almost considered resigning before the end of my maternity leave. But I knew it would be hard to find another post while my child was only a few months old, so I came back to work.
I was put through absolute hell for nearly a year. It’s hard to detail every incident, but this included having my office taken away, being consistently asked to stay later than my colleagues when this made nursery pick ups impossible, being asked to take on responsibilities far above my position without training and then being reprimanded if I made even the slightest mistake. When I explicitly queried why these things were happening and whether my manager was trying to get rid of me, I was treated as though I was crazy and had some kind of persecution complex -that this was just part of the job and I was being overly sensitive. After six months, by which time I’d been notified that I was going to be put through a redundancy consultation for my post, at the same point that the section was also recruiting for other posts, I knew that there was no hope of my continuing. I lost the will to fight any further. My mental health from living under constant stress at work had deteriorated to such an extent that I was barely able to care for myself, let alone my child. I was absolutely exhausted and just desperate for it all to stop.
After several months of the redundancy consultation, I agreed a settlement. I was given 48 hours to review and sign it. The confidentiality clauses were treated as a routine part of that settlement by all sides. Even my lawyer, who in fact negotiated some of the other clauses in the agreement, never suggested that the confidentiality might be negotiable. In fact, the lawyer’s advice was actually to cut me off, mid account, and simply to advise “Sign it, you probably won’t get more at tribunal”. There was no interest in the particulars of my case – why would there be when the mandatory legal fee included with such agreements is so tiny. It was as though the only options were to sign this agreement or go to a tribunal, which there was absolutely no way I could face. By this point, I’d also lost contact with those I considered friends at work. In fact, I later discovered that some had been specifically asked not to contact me. In all that isolation, and in that 48 hours, I could see no other way out than this settlement agreement and the day it went through, for the first time in months, I was almost happy. In hindsight, the long term ramifications were to perpetuate the feelings of isolation because I could never tell any of my former colleagues and friends what had happened. I also felt so ashamed that I hadn’t been able to fight harder for my job and that I’d let such an employer do something so flagrantly wrong.
I found another job very quickly but I’ve had nothing like the same level of confidence at work since that awful time. I am constantly nervous of something going wrong at work and I try never to talk to any colleagues about having a child. I’ve yet to see an account where an employee felt empowered or protected by an NDA of this kind (as seems sometimes to be claimed). As far as I can see, they work only to silence victims, many of whom have been through much worse than me, and all the benefits are to the employer. It’s time that they stopped. There is no point in having laws to protect the rights of employees if they can continue simply be routinely bypassed though NDAs.
