my employer sent out our personal info inadvertenly to an outside party including social securty numbers is that a violation of privacy act

I'd be very angry if this happened to me.  I'd say your remedies depends on the circumstances of the disclosure.  If the info was stolen or hacked, you probably don't have a remedy.  If the info was disclosed by mistake by your employer, you make have some rights.  I think you should contact an attorney, go over the details and if your rights have been violated, think about what you want to do about it.  Monitoring your credit score and other on-line identity sources is probably the most important thing you can do.  Some of that you can do for free on your own, but maybe the right answer here is that your employer purchases a monitoring service for you.