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This article was originally published by the Wisconsin Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors in its October 2006 Merit Shop Talk newsletter.

Building Trades to Create New Form of Salt:  The Mixed Jobsite Organizer

By Jim Pease

I’m not writing an article about a new seasoning.  Rather, I’m writing about the latest scheme the building trades unions have developed to unionize nonunion contractors.  It involves using employees of unionized employers, such as a plumbing contractor, to act as organizers of employees of a nonunion employer in another trade, such as an electrical contractor, working on the same jobsite.  Their objective is to turn every union member into a union organizer.

The name of this new scheme is MOVE, which stands for Multi-trade Organizing Volunteer Education.  It builds on an earlier scheme known as COMET, which stands for Construction Organizing Membership Education Training Program.  Both programs train members to be union organizers.  Their ultimate objective is to make every union member an active and aggressive union organizer on mixed jobsites, and to use them to gain control of the labor force with the intention of using that power to control the industry.

MOVE is built on COMET and the lessons learned by the unions in the older program.  It adds two elements.  One is crosstrading.  Normally that is something the unions avoid at all costs.  But, in MOVE, they use it to get union members to think outside of the box of their own trade.  It's an effort to increase solidarity between unions by getting all union members to unionize nonunion workers in all trades, not just their own.  This will also be used to develop stronger ties between building trades unions.

The second element added is a focus on immigrant workers.  MOVE relies on the fact that many of the founders of the union movement were immigrants, and uses that to create a tie with current immigrants.  It is also probably an effort to help unions develop their relationship with social groups with whom they are attempting to form alliances.

Mixed jobsite organizers are told that their advantage is that they can gain access to nonunion employees that full-time organizers cannot get to, and that nonunion employees don’t know they are an organizer and, therefore, are much more likely to talk to them, answer their questions and believe the positive things they say about unions.  They also are urged to obtain an extensive list of information regarding the employees of nonunion contractors to aid unions’ full-time organizers.  You can view the MOVE training manual at www.bctd.org/organizing/move/index.html

Dealing With Mixed Jobsite Salts

As with other forms of salting, it's important for employers to remember that federal law protects the right of employees to organize.  That protection extends to employees of unionized companies who try to unionize employees of nonunion companies.

Once unionized employees come on the jobsite to work for their unionized employer they have the same rights to move around the jobsite and talk to people on the site as anyone else on the site has.  And, they can’t be retaliated against for exercising those rights.  In other words, a nonunion general contractor cannot tell a union subcontractor to remove an employee from a jobsite because that employee is talking to employees of other employers about joining a union.

If a nonunion contractor has rules that limit its employees from talking with others while they are supposed to be working, and if those rules are uniformly enforced and have not been adopted for the purpose of restricting employee protected activity, then those rules can be applied to disruptions of work caused by mixed jobsite salts.  But, great care must be taken to not enforce those rules only when employees are talking about unions.  These are known as no solicitation rules and the rules are only lawful if they are consistently enforced without regard to whether protected activity is involved.  That means the supervisor shouldn’t walk up to employees who are talking about something other than their work and listen to what they are saying before telling them to get back to work. 

Consider inoculating nonunion employees by telling them, as part of a toolbox talk, about mixed jobsite salts and the fact that they have hidden tape recorders, just like you would tell them about other types of salts.  If employees know that the mixed jobsite salts are trying to manipulate them, they won’t be taken in by a phony sales pitch.  And, they won’t be surprised when the mixed jobsite salts tape record conversations with other employees.  As with all such inoculation presentations to employees, you should explain that the reason you are telling employees about these union strategies is that mixed jobsite salts are protected by federal law and employees should not discriminate against them because of their protected activity or status.

Employers who train their management team, including jobsite supervisors, in how to deal with mixed jobsite salts will help avoid unpleasant surprises and will arm their management team with the proper tools for dealing with the unions’ new MOVE strategy.

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