I work for a private career college in Virgina.

Recently, my campus director distributed my letter of resignation to one of my classes without my prior knowledge or permission.

Given that my LOR was a part of my personnel file, did the director violate my rights or break any privacy laws in this area?

Thnx!

docHart

NOT my area of expertise, and your state is not my state. It is possible for any state to come up with some laws considered different from everyone else. So maybe VA has some law in this area not common elsewhere.

I can say that looking at federal law only, there is no general law of privacy related to the employment relationship. No law saying that the personnel file per se is confidential. What there are is a number of smaller very specific laws. If for example you had a medical condition covered by the ADA and your employer made that information public, we would have a possible violation of the ADA law. But the ADA does not care about the sort of thing you are talking about, only about certain medical/disability issues. While there are a number of federal laws with the word privacy in the title, if one reads the actual law, words like "employer" and "employee" are almost never mentioned, and mostly when it does it is talking about the government being the employer.

I can say that if we flip things over and pretend that you are the employer for the moment:
- Some (but not all) medical information is confidential under ADA. Many employers treat all medical information as confidential if they do not trust staff to be able to tell the difference between confidential and non-confidential medical information.
- I-9 information is confidential under IRCA.
- Garnishments are very weakly confidential under CCPA.
- Some information such as SSN and DOB are not formally legally confidential (but should be). However if an employee had their ID stolen because of the employer's action or inaction, the employer had better hope that the employee does not find a good lawyer. There are some general (not specific to employment) actions that the employee could try against the employer. So firms I worked for treated SSN, DOB and employee bank information is legally confidential even if that was not technically true.

There is some possibility that even if a specific law is not being broken by the release of this information that some general (non employment specific) course of legal action could present itself. This would generally mean that you could show actual damages on your part and could make an argument that the employer acting in an unreasonable manner making the information available. The same sort of argument you could make against your neighbor. This however is way beyond what a free Internet could help you with. Such an action requires actually talking to a local attorney.

Employers I have worked for would have been terminally unhappy with someone making a LOR public, not because it is an illegal action, but because it is a S-T-U-P-I-D action that accomplishes nothing positive. At most the employer should say the employee no longer works here. Not because the law requires it, but because it potentially opens up possible doors best left unclosed. Smart employers should not want to take actions which randomizes their future. The whole point (from the employers standpoint) is not to win court cases but to avoid having them in the first place.

While I do not agree with making a letter of resignation public, it is not illegal in any state and no protected rights were violated.