State of the unions: labor eyes public employees to bolster ranks that, though they are weak, still stir strong opposition.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY

Picket signs bob in a sea of several hundred people milling on the lawn of the State Capitol. "Stop the War Against the Poor!" they read. "Save the American Dream!" Standing at a lectern in a prim blue dress, Doranna Anderson tells the group that she has taught dental hygiene for 19 years in state schools. "We haven't had a raise in three years. Now the governor wants to give big corporations tax cuts."

"Go back to Cuba!" Across Morgan Street, a 40ish man in a brown blazer yells into a bullhorn, its roar reverberating off downtown Raleigh's buildings. "No more unions, no more unions," his followers chant. On Anderson's side, a Harley-Davidson slowly rumbles by, a few feet from where a man argues chest-to chest with a policeman pushing him away from the curb. "But they're on the sidewalk," he protests, pointing across the street. "Fuck unions!" the motorcyclist shouts as he passes.

For nearly a century, the emotions flaring here have inflamed North Carolina, divided workplaces and bloodied the landscape. Suburbs sprawl where mill villages stood, but passions are as raw as ever. However, here in the nation's least-unionized state, the battleground, like the economy, is shifting.

From teachers, firefighters and police officers to garbage collectors and airport security screeners, there are 555,000 public employees in the state. Though the recession and government budget cuts have stunted its growth, the public sector employs more Tar Heels than any other, while manufacturing, once the stronghold of organized labor, has slipped to fourth place. Between 2005 and 2010, nearly 140,000 factory jobs vanished, most going overseas. But jobs such as those of these Raleigh cops aren't going anywhere. Nor will many of those of the 55,000-member State Employees Association of North Carolina, which organized this rally to support Wisconsin public employees who were stripped of collective-bargaining rights.

"We're no longer going to have permanent enemies or permanent friends," says Dana Cope, the association's executive director. "We're going to have permanent issues, issues that affect working families." Though North Carolina is one of only two states--Virginia the other--that prohibits public bodies from bargaining with unions, Cope minces no words about his association being one. "In fact, the association has been a union since founded in 1940. It just never called itself one because of the cultural bias that existed in the state."

That changed in 2008, when members voted to affiliate with Service Employees International Union. SE1U, which has 2.1 million members, ranks among the nation's fastest growing, most aggressive labor organizations. "We decided that since we were one of the largest independent associations of state employees in the South," Cope says, "we wanted to team up with what we saw as one of the biggest and baddest international unions in North America."

That's one reason the rally drew a counter-protest almost equal in size. It would have been larger, its tea party organizers say, if they'd had more time: They put it together in 24 hours. Anti-unionism runs deep in this state. It is a plank in the platform of the Republican Party which now controls the legislature. "Certainly there were injustices in the 1800s, but now the common worker as an individual has every tool they need to stand up for themselves," says Rob Lockwood, state GOP communications director. He calls unions an anachronism but paints them as a present threat to the commonweal: "Right-to-work states hold a competitive advantage."

The rally and the reaction to it underscores not only one of the most explosive divides in Tar Heel politics but a paradox: Unions of all stripes are barely a ripple in North Carolina's labor pool. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show they represented fewer than one Tar Heel worker in 30 in 2010, a rate so low that when Democrats announced in February they would hold their 2012 national convention in Charlotte, more than a dozen national unions threatened a boycott, citing the state's antiunion laws and hostile attitude toward labor.

Even the convention, which is expected to generate more than $250 million, unleashed bitterness. Unsuccessful Charlotte mavoral candidate Scott Stone, a Republican, and state GOP leaders accuse Democrats of conspiring to use convention contracts to give union construction and service companies a toehold in the Queen City. Unions, Stone says, "do more harm than any other single factor" to the economy. Through mid-December, Democrats say, three...