The Wall That Built Trust
A Multi-State Utility Company
At a Glance
In a unionized utility company, data privacy is not just a compliance concern — it is a political one. The collective bargaining agreement was explicit: union grievance data must remain visible only to union representatives and designated labor relations staff. Corporate HR handles a separate stream of non-union complaints. The two worlds are not supposed to touch.
But the previous system did not enforce that boundary. Access permissions were loosely configured, and there had been incidents where a union steward could see corporate investigations, or an HR manager stumbled into union grievance files they had no business reading. Each incident eroded the fragile trust between labor and management — trust that had taken years to build and could collapse with a single screenshot shared in a negotiation.
The utility deployed Ethico's MyCM platform with strict role-based access controls (RBAC) that created what the team came to call "data walls." Every stakeholder was assigned to a defined role with permissions that controlled exactly which cases, fields, and reports they could see.
Union representatives were granted access exclusively to union grievance cases. Corporate HR stakeholders saw only non-union investigations. Cross-visibility was not just restricted — it was architecturally impossible within the system. A union steward logging in would see a completely different case universe than an HR business partner, even though both worked within the same platform.
Post-implementation, the utility achieved a perfect record: zero data leakage incidents. The system enforced the separation that the union contract demanded, and the audit logs provided ongoing proof that the walls held. This was not a matter of trust — it was a matter of verifiable, documented system behavior.
The impact on the union contract renewal was direct and measurable. The union's bargaining team accepted the technology platform as compliant with their data privacy requirements, removing a significant friction point from the negotiation. What had been a potential deal-breaker became a non-issue because the system did what the contract said it had to do.
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