Salting

Salting is a union organising tactic in which an activist or paid organiser takes a job at a company specifically to build support for a union from the inside. The person who does it is called a salt. The term comes from US labour relations, where the practice is most common and most litigated.

It matters to employers for a simple reason: in the United States, refusing to hire someone because they are a union organiser is itself unlawful. The Supreme Court confirmed in 1995 that paid union organisers count as employees under the National Labor Relations Act, so screening them out is an unfair labor practice rather than a defensive measure.

Overt and covert salts

There are two versions of the tactic, and they create different situations for HR:

• Overt salting. The person states their union affiliation when applying. The employer knows, and any hiring decision that follows is visible to regulators.
• Covert salting. The affiliation is not disclosed. The person works as a normal employee and starts organising once they understand the workplace.

In both cases the salt is a real employee doing a real job. The legal risk for the company sits in how it reacts, not in the presence of the salt.

What salting signals about a workplace

Organising rarely succeeds where people already feel heard. Salting works when there is a backlog of unresolved grievances, no trusted internal channel, and managers who learn about problems from resignations. In other words, the tactic is an external answer to an internal gap in employee engagement and communication. Companies with a working whistleblowing route and regular feedback loops are a much harder target, not because organising is blocked, but because the grievances are handled earlier.

How employers should respond

The rules differ by country, but the practical guidance is stable:

• Apply the same hiring criteria to everyone and document them. Selection based on union affiliation breaches labor laws in most jurisdictions.
• Train managers not to interrogate, threaten, or promise benefits in response to organising activity. Most legal exposure is created in these conversations.
• Treat the underlying complaints as information. If the grievances are real, they are cheaper to fix than to fight.
• Keep records of performance and discipline consistent, so any later decision can be explained without reference to union activity.

Hearing the problem before someone else does

With Pulse, companies run regular surveys across the whole company or tied to lifecycle moments, with results broken down by driver and by department, location, division or position. Responses stay anonymous: results are only shown once a survey reaches the minimum number of participants, so people can be honest about their manager or their pay. The eNPS score and the mood check-in add a trend line, so a falling team shows up as a pattern rather than as a rumour.

The other half is communication in the other direction. Company announcements in Core HR give management one channel that reaches everyone, which matters most in exactly the periods when rumours travel faster than facts.