Salting the Public Sector at UC Berkeley

An uptick in salting—which is when an experienced labor organizer takes a nonunion job in order to organize a workplace—is one of the reasons for the current rejuvenation of the labor movement in the private sector. One of the most successful examples of salting is at Starbucks; the organizer who started the current unionization campaign there came out of the “salt school” at the Ida Breiman Institute for Organizing Training.

Salts were critical to reinvigorating the labor movement in the 1890s, 1910s, and 1930s. In these periods, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE); Teamsters; and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized millions of unorganized workers in the largest “unorganizable” corporations and industries, including manufacturing, auto, trucking, shipping, and agriculture. Salting can help do so again in both the private and public sectors.

With only about a third of public employees unionized nationwide, salting is a viable strategy for organizing in both densely and sparsely unionized states. In 2023, I salted a nonunion academic program at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) and learned some critical lessons for other salts.

Salting UC Berkeley

Salting is needed throughout the public sector, even in “union friendly” California where tenure-track faculty do not have a union on nine of the 10 University of California (UC) campuses. While teaching at UC Berkeley I salted the 40-year-old Fall Program for First Semester (FPF), where non-tenured lecturers were not covered by the University Council-AFT (UCAFT) Unit 18 lecturer collective bargaining agreement (CBA). In Spring 2023, I joined about 50 other lecturers teaching about 600 first-year students with less pay than my previous academic position, no job security, and terrible working conditions.

With significant backing from UCAFT, I wrote an organizing plan, researched the history of FPF, and power mapped the organization. I soon met another new faculty member who organized with me. She and I began one-on-one conversations with members of the FPF faculty to assess their support for bringing the program under the lecturers’ CBA.

Since the program is only offered in the fall, we planned to go public by November. We identified issues FPF faculty cared about, including terrible working conditions, no health insurance or pension, low pay, no job security, and a lack of resources for our students. During our in-person meetings in the hallways, classrooms, and a local cafe, and by phone, Zoom, and email, we met numerous faculty who expressed concern that faculty were not covered by the CBA.

UCAFT drafted a grievance and petitioned the state Public Employee Relations Board (PERB). The grievance argued that UCB was underpaying the faculty and denying us benefits by excluding us from the CBA. The petition asked that UCB be ordered to modify our bargaining unit to include the FPF faculty who were illegally excluded by misclassifying us as noncredit extension faculty. We recruited six faculty to give in-person and written statements supporting the grievance and PERB petition and explaining how we were being treated unfairly.

After finding widespread dissatisfaction with the way FPF treated us, we publicly announced our unionizing effort and invited faculty to an open meeting. About half the faculty met over freshly baked pastries and lemonade to discuss the grievance and PERB petition. The dozen people we recruited at the meeting became the core members of the organizing committee (OC). (See sidebar for a glossary of terms related to salting.)

The OC drafted a letter to the FPF director asking for a meeting to discuss a number of faculty issues we learned about from our one-on-one conversations. The letter and a factsheet about the campaign were distributed by email and on paper to the faculty. About 40% signed onto the letter. The OC delivered the letter to the director and was promised a written response to our requested changes in a month. However, the director never replied.

From Organizing to Settlement Negotiations

The university contacted us to begin settlement talks days after a The Daily Californian student newspaper published an article announcing our organizing campaign. We agreed with the university’s request to put the PERB unit modification petition in abeyance as long as there was progress in the settlement talks.

I chaired our OC team meetings, which included UCAFT officers and staff, and led the negotiation sessions. We kept detailed, shared notes of each meeting and co-authored each response, proposal, and counterproposal, of which there were many during the seven long months of talks with the university’s team of contract lawyers and human resources and legal staff who knew almost nothing about FPF or our working conditions.

UCB began the talks by threatening to shut down FPF and fire us all, a strategy it dropped after we threatened an unfair labor practice charge. In the final settlement we gave away much although we achieved our main goal of bringing FPF faculty under the CBA. The approximately $400,000 in back pay and benefits for two years was far short of the total owed for 40 years of work, and the language in the agreement about service, teaching credit, contract length, the rehire process, and retaliation was inadequate. The day after the agreement was signed in July 2024, UCB fired me. I was the only faculty member who was not rehired. As of this writing, we just ended settlement talks about my unfair labor practice charge for illegal retaliation in which the UC paid me a small damage amount but refused to rehire me.

Lessons From Salting

During my salting, I learned three key lessons about what works to effectively organize a public-sector workplace, identify organic leaders, take escalated action, and continue organizing during negotiations.

Lesson 1: Keep Organizing
Our organizing was thorough and effective and delivered supermajority support. One of our biggest mistakes was not continuing to escalate the organizing after negotiations began. We stopped regular communications with the faculty and didn’t hold a follow-up meeting until months later, in early 2024, to discuss demands, bottom lines, and strategy. These meetings had lower attendance than the initial ones.

Two of the six original FPF faculty on the negotiations team didn’t attend meetings regularly and soon resigned, making us look disorganized. This left all the responsibility on the shoulders of just four people, two of whom had no prior organizing experience and one of whom only attended meetings and did no other work (the other two being the UCAFT staffers).

Since there were no classes in the spring, we sent email updates about negotiations infrequently. In late spring, once we appeared close to a final agreement, we also held an online poll to gauge support for our present positions on the issues. The response rate was quite high, with only two “no” votes and one abstention.
By failing to escalate, we squandered the earlier momentum, involvement, and support of faculty members. I strongly believe this is why UCB threatened to close FPF and fire us when talks began and continued to reject nearly all our demands until the end.

Because we had so few workers in our fall semester, we expected it would be hard to keep the dispersed faculty actively engaged. Most of the faculty only taught in this program and were not on campus and personally reachable in the spring and summer because they taught in multiple places in the greater Bay Area.

One solution would have been to create separate settlement negotiation and organizing teams that worked on complementary parallel tracks. These teams should have included faculty teaching in the spring and those who were at UCB only in the fall so that personal relationships could be maintained and grown.

Lesson 2: Vet and Inoculate Negotiations Team Members

Once UCB offered to begin settlement talks, we, the two core organizers, identified potential faculty for the six-person negotiations team. One of the remaining four team members, who we recruited despite earlier concerns, began to openly criticize me and say he trusted UCB. His repeated calls for us to take their low-ball offers proved to be time-consuming, divisive, and exhausting. While he did do organizing work, he was very divisive and had to be “called in” during a faculty-only side meeting to bring issues with his actions to his attention and request he address them.

Another member missed most meetings, and the chapter grievance officer was caught negotiating with UCB’s lawyers in unrelated weekly grievance meetings. When he was asked to stop negotiating over FPF with UCB, he refused to do so. He would interrupt during settlement talks to engage in conversations with UCB’s team even though it was not on our agenda. He later tried to take over the team and had to be asked to step back by two union staff.

These experiences demonstrated that we needed to better vet the chapter officers we wanted on thenegotiations team. We mistakenly expected that chapter leadership and FPF faculty would always be on the same page, but we weren’t. We should have had a more direct conversation about the objectives, process, and strategy of the team before we started and inoculated the members and officers for what was to come. Because we didn’t do that, we had to spend time putting out fires that consumed a lot of time that could have been better used to keep organizing the FPF faculty.

Lesson 3: Stick to Your Objectives

When UCB finally agreed to comply with the contract, some team members wanted to settle while most of us held out for more. Over the many months, our objectives were whittled down in numerous offers and counteroffers. We sometimes even bargained against ourselves by backing away from our previous position after UCB rejected it without making a counteroffer. Some members were willing to accept UCB’s low-ball offers with made-up deadlines to settle—claiming that if we didn’t, they would walk away from the table.

Our original demands increasingly looked unrecognizable. For example, 40 years of back pay and benefits became eight, then five, then four, and finally two. Rehiring all faculty became rehiring based only on student evaluations, violating the rehire process in the CBA UCB had already conceded we would be covered by.
I had no support for rejecting their counterproposals, restarting organizing, and escalating to a possible strike in the fall. Two faculty members didn’t understand that it was legal for us to strike because we were not covered by the CBA’s no-strike clause. With most faculty off campus in the spring, the other three FPF faculty team members did not want to keep organizing and escalating.

Our biggest mistake was abandoning our successful organizing to focus on negotiating. Some FPF faculty team members were unwilling to use our leverage to disrupt FPF, which is critically important to the university. Because UCB used FPF to grow enrollment and generate more tuition and fee revenue, its threats to shut down FPF and fire us were not credible. Two team members never fully accepted the fact that UCB could not legally fire the members of the organizing committee in retaliation for unionizing, so we were likely to return in the fall with or without a settlement.

Final Analysis

Although salting can be pursued alongside grievances, petitions to modify a unit to include workers in the same shop in the union, and negotiations, none are sufficient by themselves without a strategy of tactical escalation in which the workers apply increasing pressure that disrupts the workplace to force the employer to concede to their demands.

Salts face internal and external challenges to organizing if and when the employer offers to negotiate. While Amazon and Starbucks have delayed bargaining for years, UCB quickly entered into negotiations. Salts need to be prepared for both contingencies.

Patiently recruiting, training, and inoculating the organizing committee is critical to the success of these campaigns when time allows, which it did not in my experience in the fall-only FPF program. Educating new recruits about worker power, labor law, tactics, strategies, and objectives is essential and should not be skipped or postponed.

Revisiting the collectively decided demands and objectives can help prevent the “drip, drip, drip” of eroded “gains” that is built into settlement negotiations and bargaining. It is necessary to resist the “crumbs theory of bargaining,” as I wrote about in a column in The Chief labor newspaper, according to which negotiators pressure members to take tiny gains that can be “built on” in later negotiations. Focusing on organized tactical escalation rather than negotiations will apply pressure on management to concede to workers’ demands. Without that pressure the boss’s threats will amplify fear and uncertainty while damaging workers’ unity. This allows those who want members to accept crumbs to prevail and keep their power.

In the end, a salt’s effort, sacrifices, and risks can result in real gains that improve our lives and working conditions and help transform our troubled world. Salting will fail to reenergize the labor movement if it results in workers merely accepting what is possible rather than what they had initially envisioned.

Robert Ovetz is a senior lecturer in political science and teaches graduate labor relations at San José State University and is author and editor of four books and author of the forthcoming book Rebels for the System: Nonprofits, Capitalism, and the Workers Movement (Haymarket Books, 2026).

Sources: Inside Organizer School (insideorganizerschool.com); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members,” news release, January 23, 2023; Lia Klebanov, “FPF lecturers, readers prepare to unionize,” The Daily Californian, November 15, 2023 (dailycal.org); Matthew Yoshimoto, “UC Berkeley provides more than $400K in back pay to FPF lecturers,” The Daily Californian, September 17, 2024 (dailycal.org); Robert Ovetz, “The Crumbs Theory of Bargaining,” The Chief, March 5, 2024 (thechiefleader.com).