Union Salting Tactic Revival Poses New Organizing Challenge for Retail Employers

The labor movement is reviving the practice of "salting" to bring unions to huge new industries, and the implications for retail employers, including high-turnover discount chains, are impossible to ignore.

When you apply for a job as an "associate" at an Amazon warehouse, you don't have to attach a résumé or supply references. All you have to provide is your name and your Social Security number, and the automated hiring system conducts a basic background check within minutes. If you clear that, congratulations — you got the job. One Nation writer who went through that same process in the fall of 2022 said their real answer to why they wanted the job would have been simple: "I want to build a union at Amazon." That writer self-identified as a "salt."

The story appears in The Nation's April 2026 issue. Salting is an organizing tactic in which a person gets a job at a specific workplace with the goal of unionizing their coworkers. The term's origins are contested. Some say it refers to pouring salt in the wounds of capitalism to aggravate its contradictions; others trace it to "salting a mine" to extract its valuable minerals, with the mineral here being, as The Nation frames it, the collective potential of workers.

Rand Wilson, a longtime labor organizer who has been evangelizing about salting for years, said he's seen a renewed interest in the practice after a less active period in the 1990s and early 2000s. "People didn't see the labor movement as a viable response to corporate greed and inequality," he said. Now, young people coming of age in the era defined by Bernie Sanders's, and more recently Zohran Mamdani's, class politics see their workplaces as a crucial frontier in the fight for a better future.

The timing matters. The resurgence in salting comes at a time when a historically low proportion of U.S. workers are represented by unions, just 11.2 percent in 2025. The economic and political headwinds that threaten worker power, from automation to corporate consolidation to gig work, also make organizing for fair wages and safe conditions more critical than ever.

For retail employers operating stores where a single associate regularly runs a location alone, the threat isn't hypothetical. The tactic was most common historically in construction, hospitality, and retail, but in recent years it has become increasingly common across industries not previously prone to organizing, including technology, video games, transportation, cannabis, and fast food. Successful examples include the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island and various Starbucks unionization efforts, where salts played crucial roles in organizing campaigns.

The legal landscape is shifting as well. The NLRB sharpened its focus on salting cases, and on July 24, 2025, Acting General Counsel William Cowen issued updated guidance that both clarifies and intensifies scrutiny around salting cases, altering how they will be investigated and litigated. Cowen's July 2025 memo to Regional Directors urges NLRB investigators to "deeply probe" the motives and conduct of job applicants claiming discrimination, focusing on whether applicants were sincerely seeking employment or were solely acting as union salts. Although it sounds deceptive, salting is a legitimate organizing activity, and salts are protected from discrimination and retaliation under federal labor law.

Employers facing salts must tread carefully during hiring and discipline, as adverse actions against salts can spur unfair labor practice charges or NLRB investigations. Salting rarely occurs independent of a larger campaign by a union to organize employees. Once that campaign begins, efforts to institute new policies to deter salting may violate the NLRA. Employers should consider implementing lawful strategies to deter salting before such a campaign starts.

For Dollar General, which operates more than 20,000 stores and has faced repeated OSHA citations and criticism over single-associate staffing, the revival of inside organizing presents a structural challenge that no hiring screen was designed to catch. The person stocking shelves on a Tuesday close might not just be trying to make rent.