Union membership status

Detects records of an identified employee's trade union membership or delegate status: payroll deduction authorities, membership numbers, join dates and dues. Union membership is sensitive information under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

Type: regex
Engine: boost_regex
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium: the primary phrases also appear in policies, guidance, blank forms and news, so enforce tiers require a populated person field and 85 adds a record-specific populated detail plus independent corroboration. Person values are customer-defined (employee IDs, position numbers), so the field regexes use labelled loose values with a placeholder guard. 85/75 are heuristic evidence tiers, not measured accuracy.
Detection quality: Topic false positive
Jurisdictions: global
Regulations: Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), Industrial Relations Act 2016 (Qld), Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), Information Privacy Act 2009 (Qld), NDB Scheme (Cth), GDPR
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701
Data categories: pii, employment
Scope: wide
Risk rating: 8
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Compatible, Macie: Compatible, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Degraded, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?i)\b(?:union\s+(?:membership|member|delegate|affiliation|status)|trade\s+union\s+member(?:ship)?|member\s+of\s+(?:the|a)\s+(?:trade\s+)?union)\b

Corroborative evidence keywords

payroll deduction, branch, industrial officer, workplace delegate, Together Queensland, CPSU, ASU, AWU, ETU, QNMU, right of entry

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Union membership - payroll deduction authority Employee name: Avery Teston Membership number: 2045117 Fortnightly dues: $24.50 Union: Together Queensland, Brisbane branch. — 85: Deduction authority with employee, membership number and dues
Trade union membership record Employee ID: 5520117 Date joined: 12/03/2024 Fees paid by payroll deduction each pay; CPSU. — 85: Membership record with employee ID and join date
Union delegate list Staff member: Jordan Staffson Work unit: Ipswich depot Confirmed as delegate for the depot from next month. — 75: Delegate list naming the staff member, no membership detail

Should not match

Union membership is sensitive information under the Privacy Act; employers must not ask about it except where the law allows. — Guidance text - must stay below 75
Union payroll deduction authority Employee name: __________ Membership number: __________ Union: __________ — Blank deduction form - must stay below 75
Union membership fell to 12.5% of employees, ABS figures in a media release show. — News / statistics - must stay below 75
unrelated generic text without domain phrases — No relevant topic phrases present
placeholder value 12345 — Random text should not match topic-specific regex
employee interview — Generic word pair from old broad template should not match

Known false positives

Policies, directives, fact sheets, guidance and training material that name the record type. Mitigation: Enforce tiers require a populated person field; guidance text has labels without values and guidance/training/media-release framing is excluded.
Blank forms, templates and HR system configuration. Mitigation: Blank lines, square- and angle-bracket placeholders, XXX and n/a/tbc values are rejected by the placeholder guard; template/fixture words are excluded.
Aggregate statistics and news reporting. Mitigation: No populated person field, so these stay at 65 discovery.
Records that identify the person only in free text (no field label) fall to 65. Mitigation: Accepted precision trade-off; extend the person-field regex with the customer employee-id format to recover recall.