[BEEdwards]

>employee gagging clauses related to workplace harassment

maybe I'm incredibly naive to the world, but the fact that this is a thing completely baffles me.

How can an employer prevent you from speaking about working conditions? Even from the companies perspective, this ban would seem to make it more advantageous to go public first, before reporting to the company which would limit your ability to do so...

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The clause likely isn't "you can't talk about harassment" but "you can't talk about anything that happens at work". That then gets changed into "you can't talk about anything that happens at work, except your working conditions which you have a legal right to discuss", which means any time you talk you risk that your employer will disagree whether it falls under that and ruin you with a lawsuit, so you don't talk...

[Hnrobert42]

They offer a settlement in exchange for silence. If you talk (before or after), you don’t get the money.

[CPLX]

They can’t prevent you from doing anything, but you can agree not to and agree to consequences if you don’t.

Whether this is ethical or not is another (and important) question but that’s the legal framework to it.

[pannSun]

There are plenty of limits on what contracts may contain*, so the "it's legal if both parties sign the dotted line" is, for now, fiction. It's also what every entity able to compel people to agree to its contracts is lobbying for.

*For example, in right-to-work states, employers can't agree to hire only union labor. Strange that that is prohibited, but an omerta imposed on workers is not.