2025 Convention Resolution One: Growing Our Power

RESOLUTION #1

IT’S BETTER IN A UNION: GROWING OUR MEMBERSHIP & OUR POWER

Across the country, workers continue to view unions favorably with a current approval rating of 70 percent. Workers understand the importance of having a voice in the workplace and the value of being able to collectively bargain over wages, benefits, and workplace conditions. In North Carolina, we have seen union victories for drivers, retail workers, and Starbucks workers, and there are ongoing unionizing campaigns for bank workers, manufacturing workers, tech workers, and many others.

This year the Trump administration has relentlessly attacked working people and our unions. Through an executive order, the administration stripped collective bargaining rights from more than one million federal workers. These executive orders and additional departmental mandates are direct attacks on workers’ rights, and our unions continue to fight against them in court and in Congress.  Attacks on federal workers are an attack on all of us. We must stay committed to standing with federal workers as they continue to battle illegal attacks from the administration. These actions by the administration are emboldening private sector employers to launch similar attacks against workers and our unions. 

The Trump administration is enabling these attacks on private sector unions. Trump fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which leaves the board without a quorum. The NLRB enforces worker organizing and collective bargaining laws for private sector workers. Without a quorum, the board is restricted in its ability to make decisions to enforce labor law. The administration has also cut billions in funding for new energy projects that will take away tens of thousands of good union jobs for workers. The administration is making things better for corporations and billionaires, not workers. 

Despite these challenges, the labor movement is organizing against these attacks, mobilizing workers to act, and unionizing workplaces. We must take bold action to strengthen our unions and build a larger labor movement through organizing. Across North Carolina, new industries such as the clean energy sector are expanding. There are expanding facilities and new facilities in electric vehicle production, battery manufacturing, semiconductors, and electrification. We have a unique opportunity to create a multi-union organizing strategy to organize these new workplaces and engage our community partners and allies in our efforts. Together we can ensure quality jobs, cleaner air, and an inclusive economy. 

With North Carolina’s union density being one of the lowest in the country, we must grow the labor movement to better combat corporate greed and runaway inequality. At the state level, we must continue our fight and resolve to repeal GS 95-98, the Jim-Crow era law that bans public state, county, and city workers from collectively bargaining with their employers. This outdated law strips away rights from too many workers in our state.

The labor movement is facing unprecedented attacks. Through unity and solidarity, we will stand up to these attacks and commit ourselves to organizing workers in North Carolina.

The NC State AFL-CIO resolves to do the following:

• Stand in solidarity with federal workers to defend their union rights.
• Call on union leaders to participate in our Organizing Roundtable and develop a labor-movement-wide strategy to increase the scale and pace of organizing and make the promise of union membership and economic justice a reality for unorganized workers in North Carolina.
• Coordinate with unions and community partners to ensure that companies that are locating in or expanding in NC are good employers and good neighbors.
• Stand in solidarity with our affiliate unions and their fights, including contract negotiations, strikes, and organizing efforts.
• Support our political efforts to repeal GS 95-98 to ensure all North Carolina public workers have the freedom to collectively bargain.
• Support our political efforts to repeal the “Right-to-Work” law.
• Encourage unions and labor councils to build coalitions with community groups and workers’ assemblies to increase public awareness of worker organizing and the benefits of strong unions and a strong labor movement.

Submitted by the NC State AFL-CIO Executive Board

Adopted September 10, 2025