Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, ON THE LABOR FRONT—Union Salts and the ‘Genuine Interest’ Requirement, (Aug 20, 2025)

By Michael J. Soltis

Acting General Counsel’s guidance seems to encourage a healthy skepticism of a salt’s assertion that he or she had a genuine interest in obtaining the position for reasons other than organizing the workforce.

Must an applicant be genuinely interested in the position sought as a condition of suing the employer for not being hired? That question is at the heart of a decades-long debate about the rights of “salts” under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

As an organizing strategy, some unions send members to apply for a job with an employer whose employees the union wants to organize. Those embedded organizers are called salts. Once hired, the embedded organizer assesses the nature and extent of union interest among the workforce and seeks to generate support for the union.

Since 2007, the NLRB has held that an applicant, including a salt, must have a genuine interest in the position sought to prevail in a claim that the applicant was not hired because of union activity. Last month, Acting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) William B. Cowen weighed in on that issue with guidance to NLRB staff investigating salting cases.

For a discussion of the impact of the Acting General Counsel’s guidance on the complaints in salting cases, see Mike Soltis’ latest On the Labor Front article: Union Salts and the “Genuine Interest” Requirement.

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