> Salting is protected activity, lying about your employment history to salt is also protected activity, and firing someone for salting is an unfair labor practice.
Huh... TIL
Huh... TIL
Unlike what other commentators imply, this judgment doesn't legitimize just inventing degrees or qualifications. It's closer to omitting that 2-month job that didn't work out
Like
* Omitting (or denying) that you have done a certain activity (eg., union founding, working with PHP, that only-2-month job because it sucked).
* Claiming (or adding) jobs or degrees that you have not worked at or earned, on your CV (e.g., claiming to have worked for microsoft for 4 years when you didn't).
To me the first one seems clearly okay, but the second one not so much.
Instead, I think it's more reasonable to have exceptions for certain protected activities, such as salting. It's in the same category as sexual orientation for me; employers should not be allowed to ask or make decisions based on it, so if you're asked as an employee, you shouldn't have any obligation to tell the truth.
Omitting entire jobs if the experience isn't particularly relevant (particularly if it was a long time ago) can be OK. I omit that I worked at McDonald's when I was 17 in the 1990s when I am applying for a job in 2024. But if there are gaps in employment history you might be asked about it, especially if it's recent.
Something like fudging employment dates along with omitting some jobs to disguise that you are a job-hopper gets into a much more grey area.
I was surprised to learn that lying about employment history to hide that you are a salter was protected. I get that salting might be protected, but did not expect that lying on an application would be.
Making it so the employer can fire you for lying about the application would practically remove protection for salting. Nobody would hire you for a non-union job if they see you being employed by a union as an organizer in your last job.
The bit that I didn't understand, and that some of the comments here cleared up, is that only lying about the employment pieces that specifically relate to past work as a union organizer are the things that are protected activity.
Missed that this is a jargon word that has a special unrelated meaning here.
My understanding was that you couldn't be penalized for organizing a union per se, but that didn't mean you couldn't be fired for other non-unionization-related reasons.
It seems like this is going a step further: things that could get someone fired in completely union-unrelated situations, are actually protected if done in service of unionization?
If so, where's the line? Can an organizer simply not show up for work and still collect a paycheck? Can they harangue the business' customers because their job requires access to the company's customer list?
ETA: Here's the relevant part of the judicial decision in this case:
> None of these employees [who were fired for lying and used to claim precedent in this case] are an appropriate comparator for McClure, who was never accused of stealing, violating traffic laws, or other criminal conduct. And, even if Respondent could show that the other employees were fired just for lying, and not for the underlying serious misconduct, Respondent could not use that to justify firing McClure because they were all accused of lying about conduct that Respondent could lawfully consider in hiring or firing them. In contrast, McClure lied about his history of working for union employers. Because Respondent could not refuse to hire McClure because of his union background, his lie about working for Deem can’t be used to justify firing him.
I expect a similar line of reasoning applying to this case: The question is about a protected, legal activity which is nonetheless undesirable for certain employers. Asking the question and requiring a truthful answer would undermine the protected, legal activity. Hence an effective remedy is explicitly allowing to lie in the response.
I don't follow. It's not permissible but these companies just blatantly ignore the law and ask it anyways? Or it is permissible?
So with very little risk, they do it.
So instead, lying on your answer is not sue-able. Which makes including such questions ineffective.
The best remedy to stop such things is a statutory ‘bounty’ for such activity - like the $2500 penalty for California employers for attempting to scare employees with unenforceable non-competes.
https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/wall-street-journal-is-mad-at-wel...
(1) the place of the discussion
(2) the subject matter of the discussion
(3) the nature of the employee’s outburst
(4) whether the outburst was, in any way, provoked by an employer’s unfair labor practice."
You should probably have added this for nuance, so people don't misunderstand you and get the idea that name calling per se is protected.
Being from outside the US, I'd never heard this term before, and actually in my country it's rare that you join a company and aren't given all the documentation by HR about what unions you can join on the first day.
But anyway, when I googled this term, from the wikipedia article:
> The tactic is often discussed in the United States because under US law unions may be prohibited from talking with workers in the workplace and salting is one of the few legal strategies that allow union organizers to talk with workers.
It'd seem them that at least one reason why they might explicitly protect the right for union members to lie about their employment history when trying to join a company for the explicit reason of salting is that they would also be / have been an employee of a union, and disclosing that could well get them deselected from consideration for the role.
Presumably the company will still be responsible for their own due diligence in checking that the potential hire had all the necessary qualifications to legally carry out the work, and might well discover the lie in that process. Presumably they could then also terminate the employee for that reason at that point because they couldn't actually legally carry out the job duties, but equally I'd imagine if they uncovered a lie which could be shown (presumably in court) to be for the purpose of salting, but they were otherwise legally able to perform the work, then the company couldn't fire them.
We have companies actively looking for an employee to represent the union. Few want the responsibilities. (hours are paid, activities take priority in the schedule) I imagine they most often end up with someone who cares about the company.
Historically, the bargain that has been struck is that current employees have substantial protections around union organizing.
However, outside unions have limited rights to directly solicit employees.
That's at the federal level. At the state level, additional pro-union rights may layer on top of that (e.g. in the northeast) or not (e.g. in the southeast).
Additionally, since you mentioned Germany, most US workers do not have a seat at the management table, in contrast to how I believe German companies are typically organized?
> things that could get someone fired in completely union-unrelated situations, are actually protected if done in service of unionization?
If you preferentially fire union organizers and preferentially ignore the infractions of non-union-members, then yes.
Importantly, the only detail on the resume that was false was the name of the prior employer. They had accrued the same experience at a union employer instead. This case doesn't allow you to arbitrarily lie on your resume in order to salt, and you can still fire someone for lying if you can reasonably prove that.
Take almost any court case that makes it to the Supreme Court or Federal government action, regardless of the court's makeup, or what party controls the White house or Congress, and ask yourself this question:
What is the pro-business or pro-government outcome of this case or legislation?
Then see how the court ruled or the executive and legislature acted. You will find the majority of the time that the pro-business or pro-government (particularly pro-police) outcome matches what actually happens.
If you lie about your work experience, it turns out you can't program Rust, then you can get fired for that.
But if you lie about never having been part of a union before, and it turns out you have been part of a union before, then you can't get fired for that.
If you get fired for being part of a union, then you’re being fired for your political position.
It’s not your fault for lying on the resume, it’s the hiring teams fault for not catching it
Anyone who ever complains about how ridiculous hiring interviews in software development have gotten should be referred to this comment. This is exactly why these absurd practices exist. Because people think they're entitled to lie, and it's your fault if you don't catch them.
Most of what I see people lie about isn't the companies they've worked at, it's the kind of work they do. For instance, when I was looking for a senior engineer I'd get people who said they did all this product architecture work, leading teams in the weeds of building products internal and external. A lot of those people turned out to be actually working on projects by themselves or they didn't actually do any technical work. The latter is pretty easy to identify because if you start asking them nitty gritty standards questions about what they built they'll be completely lost. One woman that stood out like this was part of a ton of professional organizations, and was even being granted some really big title in one of them so I was pretty bullish that I'd found my senior. The last major project she led a team on was an internal REST service, so I figured it'd appropriate for us to workshop a REST API design. Pretty easy stuff to iteratively improve through a conversation especially if you've done it a thousand times. She didn't understand the grammar of REST much less how APIs are grouped. By that point I was starting to realize her role was likely more administrative than technical as a lot of roles at her level at non-tech businesses become. Discovering engineers who say they've led teams who haven't is also pretty easy. Frankly, not many engineers have actually led teams - it's an actual rarity. Of all the things engineers are asked to do day to day, leading other engineers is generally not party to them. I'd generally ask something about how they implement "trust but verify" aka delegating work. Engineers who have worked primarily solo will not know how to break down work so that others can consume it and align to the actual idea. It's something that takes a lot of practice and the answer generally involves a pretext of what certain people's strengths and weaknesses were.
I have no doubt both of these folks genuinely wanted to do what they were applying for. I don't think they'd ever really been given the chance, or worked at the wrong kind of companies for what they wanted to do.
To call it the "fault of the team" is easy, but in reality we have a very disjointed industry with no standard practice for building software, much less as a group.
People are paid to find matching talent. Talent isn’t paid to be truthful on resumes.
That’s the crux of the issue.
Software has wild practices because there’s no agreed upon certification and there’s this myth of 10x developers and managers only want those mythical 10x-ers
Entitled isn't a statement of practicalities or realpolitik; it's a statement of ideals. "Entitlement" as a concept doesn't make sense outside of the context of morality and ethics (or laws). It's not about the way the world is, but about the way the world ought to be.
If I'm an employer trying to spend the limited resources I have to get the right people on my team, barring exceptions I'll get into below, I have a right to be told the truth. You don't have to tell me everything, and if I ask a question you're entitled to say "None of your business". But if I say, "What experience do you have leading a team" and you lie to inflate your experience, and based upon that I hire you, then you have harmed me, you have harmed your future colleagues, you have harmed the other person I might have hired if you'd told the truth, and you have harmed yourself by putting yourself in a situation where you can't perform and can't trust or be trusted. A symmetric set of harms can be sketched out for employers. So no, you absolutely are not entitled to lie to me as a potential employer, and neither are companies entitled to lie to you as a potential employee.
The one exception I'd carve out is if you had the expectation that I'd misuse the truth. If I ask, "Are you pregnant", or "Have you ever been a union organizer", then "yes" could be misused to refuse to hire me (which is against the law), and "none of your business" might be construed as "yes". (Similarly to why, in WWII, I'd answer "No" if Nazis came to me door and asked me I were hiding Jews.)
But if I'm hiring you to lead a team, what I would do with an honest answer to "What is your experience leading a team" is legitimate, not misuse; and you have neither a moral, ethical, nor legal right to lie to me in your response.
Perhaps you really meant that practically speaking, below a certain level, there's no way to police minor "misrepresentations" from one side to the other. But just because it's possible to do it and get away with it doesn't make it right; and the fact that lots of people are causing harm to others by misrepresenting themselves doesn't negate the harm that you're causing when you do it too.
This is broadly similar in principle to laws like those in many places allowing one to not disclose spent criminal convictions.
Non-salting example: over a decade ago I omitted an entire year of professional experience as a PHP developer when trying to get hired as a Python engineer, because I didn’t want to get pigeon-holed as “PHP dev who can maintain our crummy legacy PHP codebase nobody wants to touch”.
Anyway it would be extremely problematic if employers were entitled to full and complete honesty from applicants but had no equivalent obligations from their side. If businesses had the choice they’d pick the status quo over mutual transparency.
Going back to Union Salting:
Often times the "salt" is a star employee; they're always on time, never say no to a job, pick up shifts nobody wants to take to ingratiate themselves both to management and their colleagues. They don't ask for raises and never complain to management. Their intention is to organize workers and so they want to be the sort of model employee a manager will keep around.
The reason why this practice is allowed is because its illegal for unions to walk into an establishment and talk directly with employees about organizing while they're "on the clock" and on premise.
So, all you have to do to completely lie on your resume and keep employed, is pretend to be union organizing?
Now, not mentioning a job in the past, or some details of it, are a different case.
You can lie about union organizing because an employer is not allowed to use whether or not you are a union organizer when making hiring or firing decisions.
If you lie about something that the employer is allowed to use in making those decisions they can fire you.
You can lie about your union involvement. You can't make up qualifications you don't have.
It sucks if you have to be allowed to just make up work experience, but the root of the problem is the power imbalance between employers and employees, and well, that's what's unions are trying to address.
I would be against people making up experience, but replacing one company's name for another might be OK, if the companies are of roughly similar caliber (no saying you worked at Google when you were an IT for a shop).