California Just Moved to Protect Workers Who Speak Out Against Harassment and Discrimination

Moving to strengthen protections for staff who communicate out about harassment and discrimination, even in instances the place they’ve signed a non-disclosure settlement, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Silenced No More Act into regulation on Thursday evening.

Thanks to a Me Too-era regulation referred to as the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosures Act, which bans the enforcement of NDAs in sexual harassment instances, staff in California are already protected after they come ahead to report claims of sexual harassment or abuse. But as former Pinterest worker Ifeoma Ozoma realized after she got here ahead with allegations of racial discrimination final yr, those self same protections didn’t apply to staff blowing the whistle on different kinds of work-based abuse.

Now, because of the Silenced No More Act—which Ozoma performed a key position in advocating for—the present regulation has been amended in order that staff going through discrimination based mostly on race, faith, sexual orientation, gender id, incapacity, or age will even be legally protected for talking out about these experiences going ahead. The up to date regulation might be a specific boon to staff in tech—an trade that simply so occurs to be concurrently rife with complaints about harassment and closely reliant on the precise kinds of nondisclosure agreements that the Silenced No More Act seeks to guard in opposition to.

In June 2020, Ozoma and one other former Pinterest worker, Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with claims of racial discrimination they’d skilled in the course of the course of their work on the firm. In the intervening months, Ozoma grew to become more and more conscious of the intimidation techniques and authorized obstacles going through staff who sought to come back ahead with claims of office harassment, and she or he determined to lend her voice to causes and laws that will empower staff who had as soon as relied on whisper networks and luck.

In addition to her public advocacy work on the Silenced No More Act, Ozoma additionally not too long ago launched the Tech Worker Handbook—a “collection of resources for tech workers who are looking to make more informed decisions about whether to speak out on issues that are in the public interest.”