498
Opinion of the Court
Circuit recognized that "[r]elease of the employees' . . . addresses would not in any meaningful way open agency action to the light of public scrutiny." 975 F. 2d, at 1113.
Apparently realizing that this conclusion follows ineluctably from an application of the FOIA tenets we embraced in Reporters Committee, respondents argue that Reporters Committee is largely inapposite here because it dealt with an information request made directly under FOIA, whereas the unions' requests for home addresses initially were made under the Labor Statute, and implicated FOIA only incidentally through a chain of statutory cross-references. In such a circumstance, contend respondents, to give full effect to the three statutes involved and to allow unions to perform their statutory representational duties, we should import the policy considerations that are made explicit in the Labor Statute into the FOIA Exemption 6 balancing analysis. If we were to do so, respondents are confident we would conclude that the Labor Statute's policy favoring collective bargaining easily outweighs any privacy interest that employees might have in nondisclosure.
We decline to accept respondents' ambitious invitation to rewrite the statutes before us and to disregard the FOIA principles reaffirmed in Reporters Committee. The Labor Statute does not, as the Fifth Circuit suggested, merely "borro[w] the FOIA's disclosure calculus for another purpose." 975 F. 2d, at 1115. Rather, it allows the disclosure of information necessary for effective collective bargaining only "to the extent not prohibited by law." 5 U. S. C. § 7114(b)(4). Disclosure of the home addresses is prohibited by the Privacy Act unless an exception to that Act applies. The terms of the Labor Statute in no way suggest that the Privacy Act should be read in light of the purposes of the Labor Statute. If there is an exception, therefore, it must be found within the Privacy Act itself. Congress could have enacted an exception to the Privacy Act's coverage for information "necessary" for collective-bargaining purposes, but it
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