The Employment and Labour Relations Court has rejected a trade union’s attempt to compel Standard Chartered Bank to disclose detailed personal information about its employees, including names, salaries, and allowances.
- •The Banking Insurance and Finance Union had argued that access to such data was necessary to verify alleged bad labor practices including the bank’s promotion of union members into management and the outsourcing of unionisable work.
- •The union also claimed the bank had failed to remit dues and agency fees for most eligible staff, arguing that only 39 out of 978 members were accounted for, hampering the union’s operations.
- •Judge Bernard Odongo Manani ruled that while the union is entitled to general workforce information such as the number of employees, unionisable staff, and organizational charts, it cannot obtain data on individual employees without their consent.
“As regards basic salaries and house allowance for various unionisable staff who are below the rank of managers, the court holds the view that the Claimant should source this data from amongst its members,” Judge Manani stated.
“This information may then be used to estimate the salaries and house allowance for unionisable employees who are not members of the Claimant instead of compelling StanChart to disclose the data to a third party without the express consent of the affected employees,” he added.
The court emphasized that forcing disclosure of personal employee information would violate privacy laws and the protections established under the Labour Relations framework.
Standard Chartered Bank had opposed the union’s request, arguing that much of the information sought was unrelated to the legal dispute. The lender said that the union’s true aim was to use the data for recruitment, a purpose not supported by law, and stressed that employers are only required to grant unions access to premises for recruitment and to relevant information for collective bargaining.
