Union organizing is difficult in the United States. It
is a knock down, drag out fight going on
. Now at several of these companies and particularly at
Starbucks, you, a lot of people had the
perception that this company was too big to take on
. Strong unions are a vital part of rebuilding the
declining middle class in this country. Assaulting makes a
union campaign more successful because assault is usually able to
keep things underground to get enough people on board.
That by the time the company finds out about the
union campaign, it's too late. Businesses hate salting
more than they hate termites or shoplifters. Companies see
salts as infiltrators. The share of the private sector
Us workplace that is organized by labor unions has plummeted
the past year and a half has seen a startling
shift. We've seen stunning victories at places like Amazon
trader Joe's Apple, Chipotle R E I and in
some ways most strikingly at Starbucks where we've gone from
zero unionized corporate run us Starbucks to hundreds often.
Salting is a key tactic in an organizing campaign.
Salting means getting hired undercover at a company in order
to organize there, I wanted to salt originally because
my mother, uh, was in the restaurant industry
her whole life. Uh, she worked as a
manager, was putting in 72 hour weeks and she
was diagnosed with a stage three ovarian cancer. She
like a lot of people in the service industry didn't
have health care. She spent most of her savings
trying to fight that battle. And, you know
, by the time she died there was hardly anything
left. That's wrong. That that's not the world
that I want to live in. Anything that I
could do to improve. That was something that I
was going to do has been a tactic used by
union organizers for more than a century. The term
salting is said to come from the idea of salting
the mine when someone would put gold dust into a
mine to trick a purchaser. I'm my job is
to help workers who don't have unions get unions.
So this was the original job posting to advertise for
inside organizers to come to Buffalo. We ended up
having a team of about 10 inside organizers. I
reached out and said, hey, I was curious
if there was something to work on the summer through
workers United Jes said, would you be willing to
go into Starbucks in Buffalo? And I said,
I'll apply right now. I got myself hired by
playing a role. I was incredibly passionate about Starbucks
and I was incredibly smiley, incredibly gentle in the
interviews I drafted a cover letter talking about how I
believed in a future at Starbucks that involves me just
trying to capture the different check marks that managers are
looking for, you know, talking about the business
as a family and try to present the most palatable
employee to management that they could have. And it
always works. Companies of course, don't like salting
companies see salts as infiltrators who lied to them and
they are lying to their co workers and in the
service of taking away the company's authority over how the
business should be run. I defy anyone who says
that, you know, assault is a fake barista
. So these are the drink recipe cards from Starbucks
. These were the basis for training new inside organizers
on, you know, how to make sure that
they were up to speed on the recipes and the
proportions. The whole point of becoming an inside organizer
is that you are actually able to both do the
job and build the trust necessary with co workers to
be able to organize. And you can't do that
by being bad at your job. You have to
take some time to get to know people build relationships
and get to the place where you can start a
union safely and you can actually get to a union
election. Salting is going through a renaissance. Now
in the United States advocates and experts on all sides
of this have said it seems to be more people
salting right now in the United States than we've seen
in the past couple of decades. I don't think
there's any company that you could insult from the United
Farm workers to the building trades, to the service
industry, to manufacturing. The goal should be to
organize every company, union organizers in part through effective
use of the assaulting tactic have pulled off spectacular victories
but none of them has a collective bargaining agreement.
You shouldn't have to have gone through the hell that
we did by the company in order to receive our
rights as workers and to bargain with them. But
the fact that we were able to work together in
tandem meant everything. It means that now we can
bargain. Big question is, can these workers win
union contracts? And what will those contracts be?
Salting is one of the hardest ways to organize,
but it's also the most effective way because the people
who are willing to salt are the ones who are
actually willing to learn a job, become one of
the people and then build a union and help organize
. I think that's one of the most, you
know, selfless things that people can do. We
need to make sure that the majority of the workforce
is better taken care of. And the best way
to do that is through unionizing and getting contracts and
guarantees to increase wages, increase benefits. It's worth
doing and continuing to put pressure on companies everywhere to
do. Better by their workers.