NDA CAMPAIGN: Our Silence is Not for Sale
Every day, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are misused by the rich and powerful to protect perpetrators and corporate reputations.
What is an NDA?
A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a legal obligation that requires confidentiality.
These agreements are widely used in sexual harassment and discrimination disputes. They require the worker who suffered harassment to keep their experience completely confidential - that is, they are not allowed to talk about what happened to them.
In circumstances where workers do not want to stay silent, this is a complete misuse of NDAs by employers or parties with positions of power.
Although NDAs mostly require all parties (employer, victim-survivor, and the perpetrator) to maintain confidentiality, the agreement is almost always requested by the employer, not the employee.
Often the NDA serves the employer and perpetrators’ interests and not the victim-survivor.
Why does it matter at work?
Settlements rarely adequately address or remedy a victim survivor’s experience of sexual harassment, and often it means that a victim-survivor cannot talk about their experience and alert others.
Health risks of keeping secrets are well documented and can lead to post traumatic stress disorders, among other illnesses. Equally the ability to speak and putting experiences into words assists in the healing process.
What changes do we need to stop NDA misuse?
Every day, we see more and more women courageously speak out against unfair treatment by their employers through the misuse of NDAs.
We need laws in Australia that will make NDAs unenforceable when they are used by the powerful to hide harmful information about these serious workplace issues and give working women the right and power to continue to speak up about workplace issues. NDAs should only be used if the victim-survivors want one.
Our campaign focuses on three key areas of work:
- Advocacy and law reform
- Reform in legal practice
- Research on impacts of signing NDAs on women's health, well-being, career navigation and security
Join our campaign
We want to build a community of people who will continue to organise, mobilise and show solidarity with impacted women and victim-survivors who have been abused and silenced through NDA misuse.
Join the 'Our Silence is Not for Sale' campaign - fill out the WWC National NDA Campaign form today!
Contact the Working Women’s Centre Australia to learn more—we’d love to hear from you!
📧 Email us at:
campaigns@wwc.org.au
Artwork of Nicky Minus from the Workers Art Collective
Working Women's Centre Australia
Phone: (08) 8410 6499
Hours: 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday
Address: Level 2, 81 Flinders Street- Adelaide SA 5000
For support with work-related concerns, please reach out to the Working Women's Centre in your state or territory.
We acknowledge the Kaurna people as the traditional and continuing custodians of the land on which we work, along with the First Peoples language groups and communities across Australia. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. First Nations sovereignty has never been ceded; this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
The Working Women’s Centre Australia understands the term ‘working women’ mean all women (this includes cis and trans women) and non-binary people (this includes people who are gender diverse, gender fluid, masculine or feminine) who meet our service eligibility criteria.
