Journal · February 11, 2025
Why our confidentiality agreements run for twenty years
Every member of staff we place signs a confidentiality agreement with a term of twenty years. Candidates ask why. This is the answer.
Every member of staff we place signs a confidentiality agreement with the household they join, in a form we have used, with small changes, since 2004. Its term is twenty years from the end of the placement. Candidates often ask why it is so long, and sometimes ask whether it is fair. Both are good questions.
Why twenty years
Because a child who is six when a nanny joins a household is twenty-six when the agreement ends, and has by then grown up, left home, and earned the right to tell his own story first. Because a house manager learns things about a family in her first year that will still matter to it in its twentieth. Because the households we act for are, many of them, very long-lived institutions, and what is private to them tends to stay private for a long time.
The agreement used to run for ten years. My mother lengthened it in 2004, after a former member of staff placed by another agency published a memoir of a household on the Eastside eleven years after leaving it. The family concerned were not our clients. Several of their friends were, and called us the week the book appeared.
What it covers, and what it does not
The agreement covers what a member of staff learns about the household in the course of their work: the family, their guests, their affairs, their house and its arrangements. It covers photographs and recordings of any kind. It does not cover a member of staff’s own employment: their pay, their hours, the way they were treated. Nothing in our agreements prevents anyone from talking to a lawyer, a doctor, the police or a court, or from making any report the law allows, and we say so in the agreement itself, in a paragraph of its own.
Is it fair?
We think so. Staff in the households we act for are paid well, partly because they are trusted with a great deal. A member of staff who would rather not accept the agreement is free to say so, and we will not hold it against them; we will simply not be able to place them in a household that asks for it. Almost all of them do.