By Kim Kelly
Teen Vogue
December 30th, 2024
No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
The resurgence of the American labor movement is being led in no small part by a cohort of young, diverse, fired-up workers around the country. Union density remains embarrassingly low overall, but last month the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, released some genuinely inspiring numbers that suggest the perceived upswing in union activity is more than just a vibe.
During the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in September, the number of union petitions filed jumped 27% compared with 2023 — and was more than double what the agency received in 2021. Why does this matter? Basically, filing these petitions is a concrete sign that more people are trying to unionize their workplaces.
We already know that unions are popular, especially among young people. A 2022 report from the Center for American Progress found that Gen Z is the most pro-union generation in the US, and young organizers have been at the forefront of many labor actions in recent years, including the Starbucks union campaign. This new generation of organizers is embracing all sorts of strategies, including one of the oldest tactics in the pro-union handbook: salting.
Salting is an organizing tactic in which a person gets a job at a specific workplace with the goal of unionizing their coworkers. This kind of shop-floor organizing has a long history within the labor movement, and was once so common it was thoroughly unremarkable; if you were a young worker with socialist or progressive ideas in, say, the early 1900s, it was the most normal thing in the world to start talking to your coworkers about unionizing as soon as you’d learned their names.
“Compared to being a full-time union [organizer] supporting from the outside, it’s easier to organize people when you’re in the trenches with them as a co-worker, building personal relationships and trust day-by-day on the shop floor,” explains Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University and trainer for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which connects workers with union organizers.
Salting popped up again in a big way during the 1960s and ’70s, when workers who were already involved in anti-Vietnam War protests and the Black power movement found themselves also organizing on the job. Former salt and factory worker Jon Melrod wrote in his memoir, Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War, “Along with thousands of other student revolutionaries, I believed that our generation could organize workers and poor people to fight for an end to exploitation, racial oppression, and sexual discrimination, and to bring to birth a new world in which hunger, poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction were forever banished.”
Melrod’s time organizing auto workers in the tumultuous 1970s and into the ’80s may seem like a world away from making cappuccinos in a coffee shop in western New York, but when Teen Vogue reached out to Jaz Brisack, one of the most well-known salts in the modern labor movement, their experiences started to sound awfully familiar. When Brisack started working at the Starbucks on Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue in 2020, they brought plenty of prior organizing experience with them. Fresh off a successful organizing campaign at another local coffee chain, Spot Coffee, and motivated by the sting of an earlier, failed union drive at a Nissan factory in Mississippi, Brisack decided to start working at Starbucks after witnessing what they believed was a friend’s unjust firing. Within a year, Starbucks Workers United was born.
