Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World

Abstract

In Get on the Job and Organize, Jaz Brisack provides a well-written account of a trio of union organizing campaigns in the United States in the last decade. Brisack briefly describes unsuccessful campaigns involving Nissan and Tesla. She spends most of the book, however, describing the successful campaign involving Starbucks, which started in upstate New York and eventually expanded to over 600 stores across the United States. Brisack's account is personal, as she was involved in all three efforts, and provides insights which likely would have been missed by outside observers. For instance, Brisack describes Starbucks’ reaction to the organizing campaign of sending supervisors and high-level executives to the specific stores targeted by the union. She describes not only their actions but also their comments and even their outfits (pp. 104–105), presenting a vivid portrait of the company's strategy. Her account is not only personal, but also well-grounded in history, labour relations theory and legal context. For example, Brisack describes how Starbucks stretched the limits of the law to implement their campaign ‘playbook’ by ‘targeting individuals, targeting stores for closure, and targeting all workers in a sweeping form of collective punishment’ (p. 192), and later during collective negotiations by impeding bargaining. Brisack points out that US labour law, ‘orders companies to bargain in good faith, but lacks authority to punish those that don't’ (p. 204). Along the way, Brisack touches on various other important issues for those interested in labour relations, such as the tension that existed between the local organizers and the international union (pp. 214–219, 238–260), and her assessment of the most important benefits of unionization. She notes, ‘organizing allows workers the ability to take ownership and agency over the systems that try to strip people of their dignity, personhood, and self-determination’ (p. 267). The book provides a broad and helpful portrait of the organizing process in the United States and of the difficulties workers confront in that regard. At its core, however, this book is about something called ‘salting’, as evidenced by the book's dedication ‘[t]o the courageous, dedicated and caring salts …, who volunteered to get jobs at Starbucks and helped revitalize the labour movement’. Quoting a top union leader, Brisack defines salting as ‘the practice of getting a job at a nonunion workplace with the intention of organizing it’ (p. 39). Brisack describes her role as cofounder of the Inside Organizer School (IOS), a school founded with the goal of training people to become ‘salts’ by providing training programs on how to successfully ‘hire into’ an organization with the intent of union organizing. At the IOS, prospective salts practiced how to respond to job interview questions. For example, in response to a question like ‘[w]hat do you think of employees that gripe, gripe, gripe?’, a salt is advised to answer, ‘[I]f they don't like their jobs, they should leave rather than dragging everyone else down with them’ (p. 45). Brisack then describes in detail the Starbucks organizing campaign which involved her becoming a salt at Starbucks. Despite her constant fear that Starbucks would find out that she was a union organizer and not hire her, after 2 months of follow-up calls and visits she landed a salting job at the Elmwood Buffalo, New York Starbucks store (p. 63). Brisack set about consciously ‘befriending’ her coworkers, finding out relevant useful information about them and turning them into ‘peppers’ (extant workers who become part of the organizing process). Brisack's efforts ended in success when the majority of workers at Elmwood voted in favour of unionization and became the first unionized Starbucks coffee shop in the United States. Brisack's commitment and admiration for salting as an organizing strategy is clear. The practice is described as ‘heroic and righteous’ and ‘unparalleled in its effectiveness’ (pp. 39–40). As such, the book could be seen as something of a paean to salting and its use as a union organizing method from the unique perspective of a salt herself. Despite Brisack's enthusiasm for salting and its demonstrable effectiveness in the Starbucks campaign, Brisack's account reveals various issues that merit mentioning. First, salting involves a non-trivial amount of deception. Brisack notes that becoming a salt involves the ‘contortion’ of becoming a ‘commodity’ to your employer while also maintaining qualities that allow you to ‘build relationships of trust and camaraderie with coworkers’ of the kind that gets them to support labour unionization (p. 44). That is, obfuscating the truth is necessary and almost inevitable. Second, this deception is costly, taxing and has consequences. Brisack describes the tension she experienced in having to ‘ingratiate …. to management’, while not being seen as ‘too much of a goody-goody’ to her coworkers (p. 79). Brisack also describes the discomfort she felt when asked by coworkers at their first organizing meeting if she had come to Starbucks to organize them. ‘I wanted to tell them the whole truth’, writes Brisack, ‘but it was still risky’ (p. 101). Brisack also notes that while the organizing effort at Starbucks was successful, as of the book's mid-2025 publication the goal of reaching a labour contract with the company had not yet been achieved. If Brisack and her fellow union organizers at Starbucks are ultimately not able to reach labour contracts with the company, their organizational victories may in many respects end up being somewhat Pyrrhic in nature. Finally, Brisack laments how difficult the organizing process has become. The reason is rather complex and relates to the predominance the US Supreme Court gives employer's property interests. This policy choice has limited the ability of non-employee union organizers to communicate with employees at work, leaving unions few options but to engage in salting as the tactic of choice.