It’s time to salt the ARRL

[EDIT: Following some good questions and challenges on Reddit, I’ve updated the post throughout in a few places to make my arguments more clear and to address some specific objections. These changes are styled throughout the artile like this, in brackets.]

Matt, these people can help: https://workerorganizing.org

To catalog the recent troubles of the American Radio Relay League is beyond the scope of this article [EDIT: a few are detailed below]. But believe me, they’re troubled.

Before I was a ham, one of the only things I knew about amateur radio was that hams joined the ARRL. So when I became a ham, I naturally joined the ARRL. I mean, that logo, come on!

A handy public domain, non-ARRL version: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:International_amateur_radio_symbol.svg

I’m a sucker for print, and as a new ham, if nothing else, I wanted a print subscription to the fabled QST magazine, in continuous publication for over 100 years. I signed up for a paper copy of On the Air, as well. That’s their magazine for new hams.

I started to see complaints and worse on social media about the ARRL. Two podcasts opened up my eyes. I urge all current and prospective ARRL members to listen to them.

The first is an interview with ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA on The DX Mentor Podcast. Minster gets a lot of softballs, but I’m just floored at how little he thinks of his membership and non-member hams. He goes to great lengths to misrepresent or dismiss the serious concerns being raised to him. According to some, the org is in a full blown death spiral but Minster takes no responsibility or accountability and presents no plans for addressing the very legitimate problems that have been brought to his attention. This is not a man who believes he needs to do something about ARRL’s growing irrelevance or the aging out of the hobby, it is a man who believes he can bully people into thinking he’s right.

Exhibit B is this ICQ podcast on the ARRL Ethics and Elections Committee’s actions during recent elections. I was stunned to learn about the shenanigans used to keep incredibly qualified hams off the ballot because they were perceived as a threat to Minster’s ARRL establishment.

I’m a member because I’m a new ham who wanted the full experience of being a new ham and I wanted to judge the ARRL for myself. Now, I am sad to say that I won’t be renewing my membership or joining again while Minster is CEO.

Many other hams think it’s a shame, too. A fair number seem to have not only given up on the League, but now actively discourage other hams from being members. It’s too far gone, they say.

There’s been plenty of analysis about ARRL problems. Some of it quite thorough and data-driven. But not many feasible solutions for salvaging it have been put on the table. (There is now a national alternative. Joining and helping to grow the National Amateur Radio Alliance is certainly one of the more productive things you could do).

“If you want to change the ARRL, you have to do it from the inside!” — The Elmer Class

I don’t have the personal pain of having shelled out for a life membership 20 years ago and watching my beloved club be betrayed by its leadership. I do not presume to tell those hams how to process, deal with, or resolve that sense of betrayal. But for the most part, the old-timers who have grown disillusioned with the ARRL are expressing their concern by simply not renewing their memberships. That’s fine. It sends a message of sorts. But it doesn’t change the balance of power. In the end, ‘just quitting’ will just lead to a less and less powerful organization, more and more controlled by Minster’s cronies, and less and less accountable to membership.

From a slightly more detached perspective, it seems like the ARRL still sits on a LOT of useful (if not exactly super functional) infrastructure that should be in the hands of competent hams and workers rather than people who are going to run it into the ground. So, I’d like to propose a strategy for saving the ARRL: Let’s salt it.

What is salting? It’s the one occupation I wish someone had really taken the time to explain to me in high school. So, if you are in high school, please allow me the pleasure: Don’t stress too much about finding a job you love. You can always do meaningful work as a salt. Then you will love the brothers and sisters with whom you labor and struggle.

“Salting” is a union organizing tactic whereby you take a job in order to organize the workers there. Salting has a wonderful history and the practice has also seen recent success at places like Starbucks and Amazon.

Are you a labor organizer? Want to learn about amateur radio while you work? Bookmark their employment page, they’re hiring! Spread the word! https://www.arrl.org/employment-opportunities

The potential for worker & ham community alliance is an unusual tactical advantage

Based on the above DX Mentor interview, Minster appears to be immune to membership pressure alone. Besides, the ARRL may be too far gone to try to re-capture by the limited democratic means available to its membership, given how corrupt the last elections were. A couple challengers during this round of Director elections seem to be taking the “I’ll keep my head down and do ham stuff and not get distracted by the politics” approach, which is also not good enough. We need Directors who are openly willing to challenge Minster and crew. So when all else fails, unionize.

What does unionization have to do with making the ARRL better for its members? [EDIT: There is one overarching dynamic that aligns the membership and the ARRL employees : without a happy membership, the org will die. Workers, who have a natural interest in keeping and improving their jobs, will want to make the membership happy, which will be way more fun for them than making Minster happy. Even the membership fee will be mitigated by this relationship in a unionized ARRL. The workers are no dummies. They know how much the members howled at a higher membership fee without automailed QST. Because THEY do the hard work, they will know where to find the savings necessary to make the ARRL fiscally stable and will explain to us in very clear terms what kind of membership fee is needed to make it sustainable.]

Won’t it make membership more expensive if the workers are asking for raises? Possibly, sure. But isn’t serving you worth a living wage? How much did you spend on radio equipment this year, hmmmm? A unionized ARRL will help ensure that the membership fee is worth it.

A new hope. From https://archive.org/details/QST192601

Imagine an ARRL where the League’s employees are empowered to say:

• “Minster’s an idiot and he just got a unanimous vote of No Confidence from the workers. We’re not lifting a finger until the Board replaces him.”
• “We don’t need to print and store our own books and merch. Let’s move those resources to member services. [EDIT: And re-train Matt and his supervisor to take one of our six current open positions, obviously. Nobody wants to do warehouse forever. Our union helps provide growth opportunities.”
• “The hobby is dying so we’re going to stop putting old white men on the cover of our magazines.”
• “The ARRL is no longer a leader in defense of the spectrum. We’re going to make it so.”
• [EDIT: Members areunhappy and leaving at the rate of 1000 per month. We won’t have jobs in a year unless you stop the bleeding. We demand an independent committee of membership draft new elections bylaws to be ratified by vote of the membership. If you don’t? A strike for you!]

The situation has a particular set of characteristics which make this a unique salting opportunity, more likely to succeed than your average unionization effort.

• The ARRL is a membership organization. If it has no members, it doesn’t work. A unionized ARRL will have a natural interest in better serving its members. Happy membership = happy bosses + more union maneuverability.
• Given that many in the US have a passing knowledge of the history of the ARRL, and that the brand symbolizes many positive characteristics of a United States from times gone by, the unionization effort will catch among the larger public. “A venerable American institution is being run into the ground by out of touch elites? Where’s the picket line?!” Organizing the ARRL will intrigue the general public, hungry for new ways to feel like they can make a positive impact on the world.
• There are many well-respected hams with social media platforms in the community who feel deeply betrayed by the ARRL. They will be highly motivated to support a union drive at the ARRL. Community support makes organizing a union a whole lot easier.
• Connecticut is seemingly home to some savvy and gritty organizers. Being in a state with a culture of fighting union members (compared to my own North Carolina, say) will be helpful in garnering local and state-wide support.
• [EDIT: Having a small staff and more volunteers than employees is a good thing. A volunteer pool provides additional pressure on the ARRL Board and helps carry out the solidarity strikes. A small number of employees makes it easier to get all of them on the same page for a direct action.]
• To succeed, the union would have to get the ARRL membership on their side and they would do that by working with the membership to implement its desired program. It would be easier for them to get “membership” related wins first before pursuing raises.

[EDIT: An objection raised to my arguments has been that unions negotiate about a narrow set of interests: “unions negotiate over employee-management relations, not over organization-membership relations.” Yes, but that’s over-simplifying it. Union negotiations, particularly public and nonprofit unions, often have provisions to provide benefits to third parties who receive the benefits of the workers. For example, see Red State Revolt by Eric Blanc. Teacher unions and parents formed alliances in 2018 that got improvements in teacher working conditions, even in Republican states. Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. Similarly, ARRL worker conditions are ARRL membership conditions.]

[EDIT: Another objection is, “I like the ARRL just fine like it is!” Yes, but even if you like it how it is, it likely won’t be around much longer unless serious and immediate changes are made to bring members back. A membership org with that many tentacles can’t survive very long without members. https://k4fmh.com/2025/01/31/they-went-down-down-down-and-the-flames-are-higher-but-its-not-too-late/]

[EDIT: “Objection! The ARRL may not be great but only the ARRL can save our spectrum! Don’t rock the boat, you have to get elected the hard way if you want to change things. No ARRL = no ham radio.” Several orgs do a better job at advocacy than the ARRL already. A recent application and comment docket illustrates the appoint. “The application, from AST & Science, LLC (AST), requests unprecedented authorization to 430–440 MHz for a constellation totaling 248 satellites to communicate with five ground stations using up to five channels with up to 256 kHz bandwidth.” In short, AST wants more space junk and wants more amateur bandwidth to do it in. The idea that I and many other hams and many other advocacy organizations didn’t comment forcefully on FCC Docket 25–201, without the ARRL’s guidance… well, that’s just uninformed. Docket 25–201 got the fifth most public comments out of any FCC docket in the last year — more than Delete, Delete, Delete — and yeah, one of those was mine. You can literally look at all the comments and see how many different people and orgs besides the ARRL wrote epic takedowns of AST). If you want to read a really masterful public comment, take a look at the RSGB’s comment. THAT is how you put the FCC in their place. The ARRL didn’t even follow the FCC’s directions for their Delete, Delete, Delete docket comment earlier this year—and it was an Australian ham who brought that fact to my attention. Steve Stroh N8GNJ even recently drafted the Zero Retries Guide to Submitting Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Comments and Reply Comments…at my suggestion?! Repeating the myth that only the ARRL can do advocacy or pressure the FCC only helps entrench the ARRL’s lackluster status quo.]

[EDIT: Yes, salting and unionizing the ARRL is an absolute long shot. We have few alternatives and outside the box solutions must be on the table.]

Did this article happen to make it to a company employee? Here’s your first step: https://workerorganizing.org

No, I won’t be renewing my membership any time soon. But I will be agitating and educating and I hope you will, too. 😎