Breach of confidentiality

[Binky]

Advice please. A colleague of a friend of mine starting discussing her daughter's income with her. It turns out, that this person's husband is employed by the same company as my friend's daughter and has access to salary information. She commented that her husband had said that the the daughter was earning a lot of money. Surely this is a sackable offence. Is there any law to protect employees from having their personal information, such as salary, banded about by other employees to people outside of the company?

[cascarelli]

Not sure if this would fall under the Data Protection Act? Even if it doesn't it would still be a breach of confidentiality. I'd guess the difficult thing would be proof if an accusation was made? If your friend made a complaint to the company concerned I could see it being a disciplinary matter, whether it would mean dismissal would be debatable. Maybe a letter to the company's personnel department would put a stop to it and make the person think twice about gossiping in future.

[Catso]

I would have said that at the very least it is serious misconduct, and merits disciplinary action. Someone with access to privileged information like this is normally subject to the company's own information security policy and breahing it is rightly viewed as a serious matter.

As to a law, the only one I would think covers it is the Data Protection Act.

[WendyS]

If the husband has access to confidential salary information, is discussing another employee's salary with his wife and she is foolish enough not to respect the "pillow talk" her husband has shared with her, the pair of them are both out of order and the husband is in breach of confidentiality. If the daughter feels strongly about it I suggest she requests a grievance meeting with somebody in the H.R. (Personnel) Department and makes a formal complaint. How they deal with it will be an internal matter but I'm sure the individual concerned will get a warning of some kind.