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Ifeoma Ozoma has pushed tech companies to adopt employee protections for speaking out against sexual harassment and discrimination.
Minesh Bacrania /特殊的纪事报2021
Salesforce employees across the U.S. will be able to speak up about harassment and discrimination in the workplace more easily, after the company said it had agreed to limit the reach of the nondisclosure agreements employees sign.
The change is modeled on a Californialawthat passed last year, called the Silenced No More Act, which extended those protections to every worker in the state. A company of Salesforce’s size agreeing to the change for its tens of thousands of U.S. employees is a “huge win,” said Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest and Google employee who was instrumental in advocating for the law and has asked several companies including Salesforce to adopt its provisions.
The company is the largest yet in the tech sector to exempt employee concerns of discrimination and harassment from its NDAs, which will continue to guard against the sharing of other confidential company information. The move extends a string of victories for industry activists against agreements that silence employees. Ozoma and other boosters for the change hope it will eventually lead to national legislation on the issue with reach far beyond just tech.
“Following the implementation of the ‘Silenced No More” Act (SB331) in California in January 2022, which increases protections for employees who may have suffered workplace discrimination or harassment and restricts the use of certain confidentiality provisions in employment agreements, Salesforce will extend the California law’s benefits (at a minimum) nationally to all U.S. employees,” the company said in astatement.
Salesforce said the changes will be implemented by the end of 2022.
Ozoma worked on policy issues at Pinterest but quit afterspeaking outabout how she faced racial and gender discrimination there as a Black woman.
Ozoma said the Transparency in Employment Agreements coalition she formed also reached out to Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Etsy, Twitter and IBM. The group has funding from the Minderoo Foundation and includes the Open Media and Information Companies Initiative and Whistle Stop Capital.
Ozoma sent letters to the companies asking them to adopt the Silenced No More language.
San Francisco’s Twilio and Pinterest have already agreed to adopt the language, along with Expensify.
In response to a shareholder proposal that would require the company to produce a public report on how nondisclosure agreements affect harassment and discrimination claims, Google parent Alphabet said in a proxystatementthat its “employment, severance, and settlement agreements do not prohibit the disclosure of facts underlying claims of harassment or discrimination.” A shareholder proposal to study the risks associated with confidentiality clauses also passed a vote.
Ozoma said Apple adopted language similar to what’s in the California law for all of its U.S. employees, and that the company’s shareholders approved a proposal to prepare a report on the risks of using concealment clauses like NDAs in the context of harassment, discrimination and other unlawful acts.
应用程序le did not respond to a request for comment about the change.
Ozoma said a recent shareholder vote at IBM to perform a similar study brought by shareholder group Clean Yield also received a majority of votes, but the company has yet to adopt language from Silenced No More.
IBM did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Pressuring big companies to adopt the provisions was a way of expanding the reach of the California law and a similar one in Washington State to states where similar measures are unlikely to pass, Ozoma said.
“I don’t see Silenced No More moving in a place like Tennessee or Florida or Texas,” she said, adding shareholder proposals are “one of the few ways to reach folks in those states and to make the case for this being a federal bill at some point when there’s a working Congress.”
As more and larger companies adopt NDA exemptions for reporting problems, it also puts pressure on companies who have not considered doing so more seriously, Ozoma said.
With more tech employees working remotely, the tactics are meant to reach employees outside of California and Washington state.
“Because those folks have moved to find ... housing they can afford, they’re now no longer protected living in Nashville or Atlanta,” for example, Ozoma said.
“There’s now no reason for that to be the case,” she added.
查se DiFeliciantonio is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email:chase.difeliciantonio@sfchronicle.comTwitter:@ChaseDiFelice
