SALT – Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU)

Who Are SALT?

Solidarity Across Land Trades (SALT) is a grassroots trade union made up of workers across all land related trades. We are organising to fight for fairer working conditions, solidarity, care and justice in our industries. In 2023, we formed a national branch of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union, enabling our members to access expert support with case work, legal issues, training, advice and advocacy. Being a part of the trade union movement enables us to take a practical approach to connecting landworkers with wider social movements to create systemic change.

SALT members are employees, trainees, apprentices, freelancers, co-op members and volunteers working on farms, market gardens, community gardens, woodlands and warehouses. Our job titles include urban farmers, assistant growers, seasonal labourers, consultant horticulturalists, market gardeners, foresters, coppicers, flower growers, gardeners, mushroom growers, farm labourers and the list goes on.

Our aims are:

To be a place where union members can report issues arising at their workplaces and request mediation, advice, and support.
To build connections between workers across all sectors of agriculture and land work, from alternative and organic farms and/or enterprises to ‘conventional’ (chemical based) farming.
To increase transparency and accountability around conditions, contracts, working cultures and pay for workers, trainees, freelancers and volunteers.
To fight collectively for better standards of work and pay within the agroecology sector and beyond – improving the sustainability of our livelihoods.
To build power and solidarity intersectionally across land trades, working alongside existing union movements.

SALT’s Story

In the decade leading up to the formation of SALT, the people who would become its members worked across the alternative (organic, biodynamic, agroecological etc) food sector and beyond. Whilst we were brought to land work by a desire to create an environmentally and socially just land and food system, we each came to question the ways in which the alternative food movement reproduces the forms of exploitation, precarity, inequality, extraction and oppression that are so widespread within conventional farming and food production. We needed a collective space to push for more radical, justice-centred and intersectional approaches that build power amongst workers across the system.

The Rootz into Food Growing (2021) and Jumping Fences (2023) reports described experiences of discrimination, oppressive working cultures, low / no pay, lack of access to land, and isolation faced by BPOC growers in the UK’s agroecology sector. These reports were both LION collaborations with other agroecology / racial justice organisations, which brought about a moment of reckoning across the sector and inspired us to mobilise as a group of workers to form a new trade union to challenge oppression and hold employers to account.

As we began to organise together, we learnt that the poor working conditions and normalised exploitation experienced by many are exacerbated by the precarity of most farming enterprises, high competition for roles, lack of union representation, the prevalence of unpaid traineeships and a weaponisation of “the movement” to deny workers their rights.

These conditions are not unique to the agroecological / “good food” sector, as they are inherent to neo-liberal racial capitalism and imperialist systems. SALT welcomes workers from all land based trades to join and be part of shaping what we do as a union. In 2023, we affiliated with the Bakers Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) to enable us to build power with workers across the food and land system: in food preparation, conventional agriculture, delivery, retail and hospitality.

Email

SALT’s Coordinating Group can be reached on salt_union@proton.me. Please bear in mind that SALT is run by a committed group of workers on a voluntary basis so our ability to respond to emails in a timely fashion depends on our capacity and the level of correspondence we’re receiving.

Mailing List

We share occasional SALT updates to our mailing list. If you want to be added to this list, please send an email to salt_union@proton.me with MAILING LIST in the subject.