Maine's New Law Restricting NDAs Takes Effect
Maine joins a growing list of states telling employers to stop silencing their workers
This week’s issue will be short because my mother recently died and I am taking some down time. She lived to 94 and was a trailblazer for women in advertising in New York City. You can read my post about her on LinkedIn and her obituary in the New York Times, which she wrote herself; she really thought of everything! (And yes, I got my strong sense of social justice for women from my mother.)
On August 8, a new law took effect in Maine. Unfortunately, the language is a tad vague, as the National Law Review reports, and does not go as far as the Washington State law, which remains the strongest in the nation.
The article says that Maine is joining other states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington “with laws restricting employers’ use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and confidentiality terms in settlement, separation, and severance agreements.”
Another article, also recently published in the National Law Review, compares several of these states’ laws, including Washington, California, and New York. It gets into the legal weeds but if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s educational. The article ends on a hopeful note:
The push continues in some state legislatures to provide for some limitation on the use of non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements in the workplace. The motivations for the laws—preventing the silencing of victims of unlawful discrimination and increasing accountability for those who engage in such misconduct—are undoubtedly important and admirable. For now, it remains to be seen how courts will interpret and apply these laws and what impact they will have on employers’ willingness to resolve employment claims outside of litigation.
The last sentence is typical defense lawyer scare-mongering, the concern being that we “need” NDAs to settle claims. There is no evidence that this is true. The more important goal of these laws is to allow employees to speak out about workplace abuses. It seems the momentum is building to do exactly that.