Salting – Should You Do It?

My experiences with organizing at Amazon

By Mimi Harris 

Salting means taking a job with the specific intent of helping organize that workplace. It’s often understood to mean going to a non-unionized workplace and helping form a union.

Sometimes it’s done with the support of an established union, other times not. Some unions move workers around to places across the country to get jobs and try to organize, others recruit students straight out of college, and some socialist and anarchist groups create networks of class-conscious workers to organize in a shared space.  

I worked in Amazon warehouses for two and a half years trying to organize in my workplace, and through that, I joined one of these networks. I had successes, failures, and ultimately had to leave. But would I do it all again? Absolutely. 

Does Salting Mean Hiding Who You Are?

The advice I often got was to hide my leftist views, and that’s generally considered best practice: just focus on bread-and-butter issues, and hide any bigger socialist ideas. I think that’s a mistake. I felt from the very beginning it was essential that even though I was there with two objectives – first, earning my wages, and second, (hopefully less obvious to the managers), organizing – I was as honest as I could be with my coworkers and got to know them on a genuine basis. 

I proceeded with caution as best as I could. I was honest about my background and being college-educated. I alluded to my socialist organizing by telling coworkers that I was a housing activist and active with the Black Lives Matter movement. I even invited some of my coworkers to socialist activities if I thought they would enjoy it. I called my organizing activities my ‘other job,’ because people sometimes didn’t understand why my outside work organizing commitments were hard commitments, but even then I would be honest about what that entailed. I felt like this was really important because I developed genuine friendships with my coworkers where we got together outside of work and they shared their personal lives with me. I wanted to reciprocate that as much as I could. 

Sometimes I got scared that it was a problem if people knew that I was a socialist, but I think the most it ever led to was that there were some Trump supporters or believers in capitalism who wanted to talk to the crazy socialist. I think overall that was a good thing and not a bad thing. At the same time, I tried to stick to the nuts and bolts issues facing us in the warehouse, but I didn’t shy away from connecting the dots about the issues we face. I feel anything less is, to be honest, condescending. 

People liked me at my workplace because I was honest. I don’t know if people would have liked me if I was pretending to be something I’m not, even if I might have “fit in” better. I wasn’t a different person, I was just me. 

One of the hardest things was finding the line between pointing out the contradictions in our workplace conditions and complaining. I didn’t always hit the target. Sometimes, I would have to spend days or weeks repairing my image if I veered too far and was seen as complaining. I feel like once you have class consciousness, some things become easier because people can’t gaslight you so much, you understand what’s happening, and you even have some ideas about what to do about it. 

At the same time, the conditions we all have to work under feel acutely unjust because you’re so aware of the exploitative dynamics, and it’s almost impossible to feel pride in work when you know that work is being exploited to make billionaires that much richer. So pointing that out to people, even if deep down they know it, can bring out some natural resistance. 

The Working-Class is Complicated

We might have some caricatured idea of what kind of person works at an Amazon warehouse, but this capitalist world has a lot of roads that can lead you to the doors of a warehouse looking for work.  One of my coworkers, let’s call him Luke, was someone who stood out to me in his contradictions. He was around 18, and we were friendly, but he was skeptical of my leftism. I was also skeptical of the beliefs he held, such as the belief that if he worked hard enough someone at the top, maybe even Jeff Bezos, would take notice. He had heard reports that some of the executives would stop by the warehouse, and he held out hope that he would get noticed and make it to the top. It makes sense why someone would cling to that idea. 

Luke once asked me, “Hey, are you a socialist or something?” and I responded, “well, yeah”. We couldn’t continue the conversation because we were working on the induct belt which goes too fast for conversation, but he’s the one who broke the ice of the “s word” for me at the second warehouse I was at. 

There’s this horrible dynamic of people working against each other because the company makes it a literal competition. Every two hours, they would read out a list of workers from slowest to fastest, so there was a practice of going into other people’s lanes to steal each other’s’ ‘jiffies’ (those soft white Amazon packages) to get your rate up. Luke would help me get through my boxes so I would have time to get my jiffies done so they wouldn’t get stolen. 

So the same person who thought I was crazy for being a socialist, who wanted so badly to get the approval of management, also went out of his way to help with no benefit to himself.

I felt really bad all the time that I had trouble keeping up my rate. I’m young(ish), healthy, and taller than many other women who were working there. When we had to wrap pallets, I would get so nauseated I thought I would pass out on a daily basis. It made me feel like what’s wrong with me, everyone else can do this but I can’t. It was actually an important education for me, because others also couldn’t do it. They held it together for a couple months, but then would quit. But as a salt, I was committed to it for the long haul. While others quit after a few months, I was there for two and a half years. We have this idea that there are some hardened workers who can deal with these tough conditions, but I don’t think there are. People just get worn out and quit or get hurt. 

Just as I was Starting to Have Success…

I salted at three different shifts/warehouses, and not by choice. I got transferred/let go three times and finally lost my job due to covid. The first time was the most successful in terms of organizing. We had a group of workers, mostly women who were single mothers and immigrants speaking several different languages between our group, who were getting increasingly organized. When one of our coworkers and her daughter suffered homelessness to flee an abusive spouse, we held a fundraiser and even won the right to use the break room for it. 

But then our whole team got broken up. Not in retaliation as far as I can tell, just because that’s how Amazon works. Nothing is stable. I was moved to the night shift, but all my coworkers who were single parents had to quit. 

The second time was when Amazon over-hired. The third time my shift was consolidated, and I was once again told to transfer or lose my job. I started on a 4am shift at a new warehouse where I worked for several months before leaving due to fear of transmitting COVID to my immunocompromised partner, and I was told I was unable to re-apply for a full year. 

What’s the Difference Between Salting & a Rank-and-File Strategy?

The difference is that with salting you pick your industry with strategy in mind, but this whole red baiting of the labor movement as if the major working-class movements of the last century weren’t led by workers who were consciously socialist is silly and ahistorical. Picking up a copy of the communist manifesto doesn’t place you suddenly outside of the working-class. Of course there are socialists that try to LARP as some caricature of the ‘working-class’ and come off looking very cringe. And while that’s not an effective organizing strategy, unless they have some giant pool of money stashed away that they could live off for the rest of their lives, they’re still part of the working-class (just a weird, alienating part of it). 

In a certain sense, anyone who sees their workplace as an organizing space is salting. And any socialists that don’t see their workplace as an organizing space… well, maybe they should take another look through that Communist Manifesto. Think of it this way: if you are looking for a place to work – as one does – it’s absolutely worthwhile to add to your considerations where you could have an impact together with others to build toward working class power. If you’re going to be a barista anyway, maybe this is the time to choose Starbucks or another cafe where workers are trying to win breakthroughs for their conditions. Maybe read more about the coming UPS battle in 2023 – and join that workforce.

And many times, the job you already have, the job you chose regardless of strategy, is the most effective place you can be organizing. You’re probably already rooted there and you hopefully know your coworkers. The only thing left is to be preparing the ground and building practices of comradery for when workplace issues come up, and helping your coworkers channel their energy to develop a strategy for collective action for change when these crises inevitably occur. 

But if you want to salt at Amazon…

My advice to anyone trying to organize at Amazon: Work at a smaller warehouse (we’re still talking 500 people). It is so hard to organize, so make it easier on yourself. You don’t need to work at the biggest, most strategic warehouse. At this stage of the labor movement where we are just starting to pull ourselves out of the blackhole abyss we’ve been in, we need footholds. 

We need to organize where we can, and build up from there. Maybe that is a 20-person Starbucks. And maybe that 20-person Starbucks is less central to the economy than the whole logistics network of Amazon, but it’s showing what’s possible when workers come together. 

Eventually we’ll need to not just organize an Amazon warehouse here or there, but we’ll need to organize to shut down the economy as part of a political and social revolution. We have to build towards that. 

Something I think a lot of DSA members can relate to is that while experiencing losses and treading water is inevitable, wins are important. Even small wins can be a spark that sets off an explosion of organizing.

What kind of network do we need? What role can DSA play?

At the moment, we have a lot of  fragmented salting efforts, and that’s really inefficient. For years, I was the only salt I knew about in my warehouse. Then, a couple years in,  I found out there was someone at the warehouse I used to work at. We should have been in touch. It sounds so simple, but that could have made a difference in preventing my coworkers from getting laid off. 

The established wisdom is that salting should be connected to a big union, but I’m not so sure you need all that. Big unions like SEIU also bring their baggage of top-down organizing, bureaucratic approaches, etc. 

The thing you need more than anything is a place where like-minded people are uniting and strategizing around the same goal.  There is quite a significant history of leftist organizations (anarchist or socialist) filling in that gap when the stronger and bigger parts of the labor movement are not. DSA can help be a space for those connections, building those spaces for salting networks (both intentional and natural salts), while working with unions that take up the call of organizing new workplaces. 

It’s not easy to make these connections, especially with work that is so easily targeted by bosses if word gets out about workers’ intentions to organize, but I truly believe there are no shortcuts in this regard. The truth is that people are absolutely starving for change, but offered so few options about how to get it. No salt or union activist is going to be the unitary force that changes that, but we can be there when people are ready to struggle, and we can be a wellspring of confidence that if we fight, we can win – not just a better workplace but a better world. In our dark and broken world, that is quite a lot.