Huggies diapers, halogen floor lamps, Depend undergarments, I launched their journeys to the Kmart store near you. Some nights I moved so much Quilted Northern that I felt personally responsible for the collective ass wiping of the Mountain time zone. To Kmart, I was Associate No. 22699 at its Denver distribution center, the guy from Boulder who didn't smoke or eat meat. To the AFL-CIO, I was a "salt" or a "colonizer," a spy in the service of the American labor movement.

"This is not 'Norma Rae,'" Mark, the organizing director, told me. "You're not there to rile people up. Stay quiet, blend in as best you can and keep your ears open. If someone mentions anything about a union, don't say anything. If the campaign is a go, we might put you on management's anti-union committee. Anything can happen. Be prepared to be bored; pretty soon you'll forget that you're anything but a Kmart worker."

The consensus among seasoned union organizers is that the best of them are born out of the shop floor struggle for union representation. Those who have lived through management's often dirty and always divisive anti-union campaigns are best suited to lead workers through them. I had come through the AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute, which trains both rank-and-file union members and young, socially conscious college graduates in the fundamentals of organizing. I was a hybrid of the two, having been a member of a craft union in the film industry, but still young and naive enough to delight in an undercover assignment of non-union shitwork.

I harbored doubts about my capacity to be an organizer. I'm soft-spoken, frequently mistaken for gay and, according to my cousin, dress like a librarian -- in other words, not a likely stand-in for the macho, chain-smoking, coffee-swilling, fast food-inhaling stereotype of the male union organizer (a generalization, incidentally, that I found to be quite accurate). Salting was my personal litmus test for my future as an organizer. Coming through alive would bestow me with the labor-movement street credibility I so needed, along with an intimate understanding of what the struggle looks like from the inside. It would, I hoped, light the fire necessary to fuel an often-thankless itinerant lifestyle of economy motels, strained personal relationships and hard work.

I was ready for the challenge of organizing Kmart; what I didn't know is that I'd end up fighting a very different battle than the one I'd chosen.

The Free Software Project
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