11 ms·

> Salting is protected activity, lying about your employment history to salt is also protected activity, and firing someone for salting is an unfair labor pract

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• InvaderFizz 2y ago
  That stuck out at me too. So, all you have to do to completely lie on your resume and keep employed, is pretend to be union organizing?
  • frapaconi 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • jdiff 2y ago
      Nope, that's also not allowed.
      • frapaconi 2y ago
        How is it not allowed? Employers can’t choose who they want to hire? You’d obviously word it differently: unfortunately you’re not as good as another candidate. Better luck next time!
        • immibis 2y ago
          It's not allowed because of exactly what you just said.
        • ethbr1 2y ago
          How would you know? Equifax Employment Verification et al. Which begs the question of whether those are illegal too...
        • saagarjha 2y ago
          Employers can’t choose who they want to hire when that decision is related to union involvement, yes. You’re not the first person to think that hiding the real reason for employment discrimination somehow makes it legal. It is not.
  • ralferoo 2y ago
    I'd imagine it'd go to court and the union would have to testify that this is the case, and also have documentary evidence to back it up.
  • p_l 2y ago
    Inventing qualifications is probably still not legal. Now, not mentioning a job in the past, or some details of it, are a different case.
  • tzs 2y ago
    No. 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.
  • Volundr 2y ago
    > So, all you have to do to completely lie on your resume and keep employed, is pretend to be union organizing? You can lie about your union involvement. You can't make up qualifications you don't have.
• kingkawn 2y ago
  As it should be
  • jpambrun 2y ago
    Care to elaborate? I can't think of any argument for this position.
    • charlesabarnes 2y ago
      Organizing a union once in your employment history would bar you from employment at a ton of companies otherwise
      • jpambrun 2y ago
        What is this about then. Obviously you can omit stuff on your resume. I take offense at adding fake experiences.
        • vintermann 2y ago
          It can maybe be tough to explain what you were doing in those years you were actually working at a well-known heavily unionized business. 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.
        • stavros 2y ago
          This isn't about adding fake experiences, though, no? It's about omitting experience you've had.
          • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
            Depends on what you consider a "fake experience". The guy in this case legitimately had 4 years of HVAC experience, but he falsely claimed it was at one particular (non-unionized) company when it was actually at two different (unionized) companies.
• CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I'm curious what the logic is to justify lying about employment history in order to salt a union. 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?
  • alpinisme 2y ago
    Consider the alternative where employers can fire you for lying about your employment history. Once you’ve done some union organizing, you’d be potentially unhireable. 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.
  • Xylakant 2y ago
    In Germany, there are certain kinds of questions that are not permissible on an employment questionnaire, for example asking whether a candidate is pregnant or plans on having children, union affiliation, etc. However, these questions are often included in the questionnaire and not answering them would provide sufficient signal to the employer and the only remedy would be to sue the employer. So it's explictly permitted to lie in the answer, rendering the questions useless. 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.
• scrapcode 2y ago
  That seems absolutely ridiculous to me... what am I missing? I can lie about my work experience in order to infiltrate a business and form a union?
  • Drakim 2y ago
    Maybe it's specifically in the context of unions and nothing else? 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.
    • dartos 2y ago
      Well, if you’re hired as a rust engineer and you don’t know rust, you’d be fired for not being able to fulfill your job duties. 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
      • seneca 2y ago
        > 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.
        • oooyay 2y ago
          I've interviewed a lot of people over my career. I'm not sure "entitlement" is why the people who lie do so. 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.
• jpambrun 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • jdiff 2y ago
    And yet, cutting and lines coexist in the same universe.
    • jpambrun 2y ago
      On that slope nothing should considered immoral.. if one kills we can all be murderers..
      • jdiff 2y ago
        If you invent a slope you're legally allowed to put anything you want on it, just know that slopes tend to turn into curves when you back up. The existence of carnivores hasn't eliminated herbivores. For some reason evaporation hasn't boiled all our oceans away.
  • dartos 2y ago
    If that has to be punishable, then job listings with false or misleading information should be too. Also, offer letters must be legally binding at the time of being offered. Also, saying you’re hiring when you’re actually not. Lying on the resume is literally all the leverage most people have in the job hunt.
    • jpambrun 2y ago
      Everything you mentioned is immoral. Two wrong doesn't make it right. If you cheat, to compete you your lies I now have to lie. And it completely breaks the system. Also, you don't deserve more leverage over other prospective candidate. This is cheating and fraud. It requires punishment.
      • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        [flagged]
• nohuck13 2y ago
  If lying about you employment history is a protected activity, then if a pre-employment background check catches you lying about your employment history, and you say "no I am salting," that also is protection from having your offer rescinded?
  • cess11 2y ago
    In court it would be tested whether your deceit is actually relevant to the salting. Faking an entire resume to get into a place where you can't do the work isn't likely to fly, hiding your time working for a union by claiming you did first line customer support might.
• ketzu 2y ago
  I assume quite a few people think of one way of "lying" about employment history, that they have very strong feelings about how it should be handled. 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.
  • n2d4 2y ago
    Personally, I think "denying" is also bad, while "omitting" is fine. 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.
    • SoftTalker 2y ago
      I agree omitting is usually OK especially if it's not relevant. 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.
      • cool_dude85 2y ago
        >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.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Quanttek 2y ago
  The idea is pretty easy: If an employer could simply ask you about past union activity (or activity indicating it, such as certain training) and then fire you for lying about your employment history when you omit it, then the protection for unions is effectively neutralized. 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
  • ndriscoll 2y ago
    > McClure applied as a covert organizer, or salt. He gave Respondent a resume that falsely claimed that he worked at a non-union company called Deem from 2018 to the time of his application... McClure testified that he believed claiming to work for a non-union employer would increase his chances of being hired, as people in the HVAC industry would generally recognize WMI and Habel as union shops and Deem as non-union.
• AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  We have had decades of worker suppression that lead people to think that it’s illegal to collectivize against your employer and it’s just not the case
  • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    I don't think that's what people were surprised about. Just speaking for myself, I was originally surprised by the statement "lying about your employment history to salt is also protected activity". After all, it's seems to make perfect sense that I can be fired for lying on my resume. 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.
    • Izkata 2y ago
      Yes, salting in general is adding something. Sounds like inventing a job you didn't actually do is protected? Doesn't make sense. Missed that this is a jargon word that has a special unrelated meaning here.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  Here's an exercise for you. 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.
• singron 2y ago
  This is not a valid interpretation of this case. The judge concluded that the employer fired the employee in retaliation for union activity. The company claimed they fired him for lying on his resume, but they couldn't prove that was the reason (which is their burden to prove), and it wasn't consistent with prior company behavior. E.g. they had a recorded conversation about how they could figure out a way to not hire a union applicant, and they had never fired anyone for a similar infraction before. 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.