| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. And here it is… If you want to unionize a workplace, Will Westlake was saying, get used to unclogging the drains. At a secret off-hours gathering held in Rochester, New York, in March, the 25-year-old former barista told a few dozen labor activists that a great way to build trust with co-workers and bosses is to volunteer for thankless chores. In his case, that meant spending months at a Starbucks outside Buffalo in 2021 getting on his knees and reaching beneath the sinks to yank loose the grimy mix of mocha chips, espresso beans, congealed milk and rotten fruit that regularly stopped things up. "Be the person who's willing," Westlake said. "It's going to make the company less suspicious of you." The proof, he told the crowd, came toward the end of 2021, after baristas at his Starbucks and others in the area had filed federal petitions to hold union elections. Executives and managers arrived from across the country to work shifts at the cafes and conduct mandatory meetings about the potential dangers of organizing. According to Westlake, the then-president of Starbucks Corp.'s North American division personally warned at least one new hire at his store to be careful about trusting other staffers, naming several baristas she suspected of being covert union operatives. Confused and distressed, the hire called up a trusted colleague that the big boss hadn't named: Westlake. (Starbucks has denied all claims of anti-union activity at its shops.)  Union activist Will Westlake. Photographer: Malik Rainey for Bloomberg Businessweek The practice of joining a workplace with the secret aim of organizing it is called "salting." Westlake was addressing recruits at the Inside Organizer School, a workshop held a couple times a year by a loose confederation of labor organizers. At these meetups, experienced activists train other attendees in the art of going undercover. Speakers lecture and lead discussions on how to pass employer screenings, forge relationships with co-workers and process the complicated feelings that can accompany a double life. Most salts are volunteers, not paid union officials, but unions sometimes fund their housing or, later, tap them for full-time jobs. Workers United, the Service Employees International Union affiliate that's home to the new Starbucks union, hired Westlake as an organizer around the time the coffee chain fired him last fall. Through interviews and exclusive visits to undercover training sessions over the past year, Bloomberg Businessweek got an unparalleled look at the revival of American salting, which has been around for a century. Until now, salts have been the mostly secret ingredient in a once-in-a-generation surge of union organizing that's spread from Starbucks and Amazon.com Inc. to other Fortune 500 companies in the Covid-19 era. At least 10 undercover activists, including Westlake, landed jobs at Starbucks cafes in the Buffalo area, where they quietly laid the groundwork for the first successful organizing campaign among the company's US employees in decades. That victory inspired hundreds more successful union votes at Starbucks and other companies. Early on, a group of six salts made up half the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union that won an election at an 8,000-person warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York last spring. "They didn't make or break us, but they were definitely helpful," says the Amazon campaign's most prominent organizer, Christian Smalls. For the full story by Josh Eidelson—it's fascinating!—go here. Correction: Monday's newsletter incorrectly characterized Bitcoin's price. It's down about 39% from a year earlier, not since the start of 2023. | 
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