CWA Allies Ask Angela Merkel to End T-Mobile Employee Gag Order Policy

In a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the National Women's Law Center, the AFL-CIO and seven other leading women's organizations asked the German government – a major shareholder of Deutsche Telekom – to press T-Mobile to abandon an employee gag order policy that violates U.S. law and restricts workers' ability to address sexual harassment and other workplace violations.

This past August, a National Labor Relations Board judge found T-Mobile guilty – in Maine and South Carolina – of unlawfully requiring employees who brought complaints of sexual harassment or other forms of discrimination to the company's human resources departments to sign a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited them from discussing their experiences with anyone during the company's investigation. As a result, employees were forbidden from banding together with coworkers who experienced the same harassment or discrimination, and were illegally deterred from bringing complaints with enforcement agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

"U.S. workers have a basic right to speak out and challenge sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace without fear of facing retaliation or losing their jobs," said Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel at the National Women's Law Center. "By threatening employees who talk publicly about sexual harassment or other workplace abuses, T-Mobile's gag order policy violates this right. Indeed, T-Mobile's policy threatens workers to remain silent or risk their job. We hope that the German government, as a major shareholder of T-Mobile's parent company, will urge T-Mobile to quickly reform its practices to respect workers' voices and obey the law."

The pressure is building as we win more allies.

Our petition is located here.