Our View: Worker Privacy Act amounts to needless intrusion

Being first can be a measure of victory and a cause for pride.

Or it can be a sign of reckless impulse, which is the case with the so-called Worker Privacy Act that’s under consideration in Olympia. Before legislators make Washington the first state to commit this unwise intrusion of the workplace, they need to pause and think about why no one else is using it.

If Senate Bill 5466 or its companion measure, House Bill 1528, becomes law, employers will be prohibited from requiring their workers to attend meetings about “political or religious matters.” Even if the meetings were on company time, requiring attendance at them would be grounds for a lawsuit.

Representatives of organized labor, the leading proponents of the measure, contend the law is needed to protect workers’ rights. The right, for instance, to thumb their noses at the employer who believes it’s worthwhile to have employees spend part of their paid time hearing a message – maybe about labor relations, or politics, or, yes, even religion.

The measure would ban mandatory meetings unless the subject matter is strictly and directly about job performance and business-related issues.

According to a state attorney general’s informal legal opinion, such a ban is not permitted under federal law – the “supreme law of the land,” in constitutional parlance. That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a similar but narrower California measure that, unlike SB 5466, applied only to businesses receiving state funds.

Federal law already prohibits employers from herding employees into a room and threatening them with consequences if they support a union, which seems to be organized labor’s concern. That would be coercion, and it’s already illegal. But as Justice John Paul Stevens noted for the seven-member majority in Chamber of Commerce v. Brown, federal labor law includes “explicit direction from Congress to leave noncoercive speech unregulated.”

Allowing businesses the discretion to choose whether employees stamp out widgets or spend an hour attending a meeting on company time is not coercive and does not erode any worker’s right to make up his or her own mind about the issue at stake.

However, removing that discretion would invite costly and probably futile legal challenges. Worse, it would give businesses that are either in Washington or thinking about it a reason to consider one of the other 49 states.

Federal law already protects employees from inappropriate coercion by their bosses. The Worker Privacy Act is unneeded and unwise.