Privacy act is about freedom

Are you people nuts? I’m talking about your lead editorial of March 5.

You say the proposed Worker Privacy Act “amounts to needless intrusion,” but you don’t think it is intrusive if I am harangued by my employer on politics or religion?

This is a question of individual liberty and free choice. If I hire on to The Spokesman-Review, I expect to do the duties required of me to help produce a newspaper. I don’t hire on to listen to somebody hold forth on company politics or religion. That interferes with my personal privacy and subjects me to workplace harassment. It could easily be coercive if you expect me to kowtow to your views. No thanks, I’ll work for somebody else.

There has been a notion afoot for a long time that, by some mysterious process, an employer comes to “own” an employee and is free to impose requirements that extend beyond the workplace and its functions. Well, the days of plantations are gone forever.

The proposed Worker Privacy Act is not just about unions. It’s about freedom.

Lee Freese

Spokane