I should narrow the scope of my statement a bit. I understand a need for, and support, carefully crafted NDAs that protect information like credit card numbers and personally identifiable information. I am skeptical of overly broad or vague NDAs, as well as non-disparagement clauses. I am particularly skeptical of the appropriateness of offering payoffs to an employee of WMF (or affiliates) in exchange for the employee's agreement to a non-disparagement clause.
Pine
On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm looking at this issue from a few angles.
- If an initial employment contract has a provision that employees who
voluntarily resign and provide X amount of notice will be paid out something like their accrued vacation time (I believe that some jurisdictions require this) and a certain amount of medical coverage (ranging from the remainder of a month to 6 months), and no restrictions on free speech are involved, I think this would be fine.
- If there is a payoff of WMF funds to employees in exchange for them
agreeing to speech restrictions, I would question whether that's an appropriate use of donor funds and also whether placing conditions on employee speech is appropriate for an organization that is supposed to be strongly aligned with values of freedom of expression.
- I think that there should be more transparency about how WMF funds are
used in general, and this includes employment matters for both WMF and affiliates. Government agencies in the US disclose a lot of information about their employees, almost always including compensation, and in many jurisdictions disciplinary records are also public records. It seems to me that WMF should strive to have at least the same standard for transparency of government agencies. Among other problems that arise when compensation levels are opaque, it's very difficult to do a thorough job of evaluating WMF and affiliate budgets without knowing how employees are compensated so that the appropriateness of that compensation can be evaluated. IEG grantees already have our compensation published, and it seems to me that this practice should be extended to the other grants programs and to WMF.
Pine