On September 30th, over 120 workers, worker organizations, unions, and activists gathered in Greensboro, North Carolina at the historic Beloved Community Center for the NC Worker Action Summit. Workers and worker organizations from across the state joined together to share struggles, organizing skills, and build together towards a fighting and united workers movement inthe South. We hosted workshops, panels and trainings covering Heat Stress campaigns, Faith and Labor, Data Center and AI fights, Organizing Skills, The Rank and File Program, International Solidarity, Defense of Democracy at the polls, Workers and The Black Freedom Struggle, May Day 2028, and more.
The march towards May Day 2028 was a major focus as the opening plenary brought together working class leaders who are making organizing history in North Carolina. In the opening plenary Christina Cole, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators set the tone for the summit, sharing the sacrifice that NCAE has gone through to become a power-building union with strong member leadership, selling their headquarters to invest in on-the-ground organizing and build majority-strong chapters in Edgecombe, Forsyth, Durham, and Asheville. This work showed May Day 2026 with 15,000 people in the streets, closing 22 school districts representing 67% of public schools staff in the biggest May Day action in the country. Cole points to this in the Kids over Corporation , the NCAE take on People over Billionaires as the way forward in the peoples right to public education and workers rights to strike and collective bargain. Deep organizational commitments to power-building is what it took to make a difference on May Day 2026 and what it will take for May Day 2028
The reality of labor history being made by grassroots heroes was felt all throughout the summit as the state-level focus of this summit built local connections and solidarity across labor silos as we learned from each other’s wins and struggles and marked out future plans together. Workshops on Faith, Community and Labor and Workers and the Black Freedom Struggle grounded us in our shared history of organizing and sacrifice that we build on. Panels on Heat Stress in a climate emergency and the local fight against Data Centers highlighted workplace and community lead fights for power over control of the environment and working conditions.
Workers recruited into strategic industries to build worker power from the ground up shared their experience in the Rank-and-File Program training.
In the afternoon, we gathered into sector breakouts to hear more concentrated conversations between people who work have different roles and workplaces in the same field. These sessions laid the groundwork for industrial council organizing in the food service industry and supported organizing of a Healthcare Workers Council, both of which have continued to meet and strategize after the Summit. The NC Action Summit presented a united front across a diversity of industries, rural and urban localities, and generations with experience from historic fights and those on fire in emerging struggles. Here, we got to see a picture of what a broad-based working-class movement looks like in motion.
Organizational support from leading locals in UNITE HERE, UAW, and NNU, among others built important relationships that play an important role in the future of grassroots labor organizing and meaningful solidarity beyond symbolic activism. Worker leaders present felt the needle move on a local level in raising class consciousness- as conversations on class-level struggle led to workers identifying themselves as the working class. UAW Local President John Greene presented this in his closing remarks: a general strike in 2028 will be won by building stronger connections, continued solidarity, and struggle.
“ And that is power. May or May 1st, 2028 isn’t going to magically become historic just because we circled a date on the calendar. We have about a year and a half to build it. We have to organize. We have to educate. We have to talk to workers who have never been involved in their unions before. And we’ve got to organize workers who don’t have a union at all, especially in the South, because I believe organizing the South is absolutely essential for rebuilding the labor movement in this country…On Mayday, 2028, I want corporate America to understand something that working people should have remembered a long time ago. Nothing moves without us. We build the trucks, the cars, we move the freight, we stock the stores, we teach the kids, we keep the hospitals running, we keep the lights on, we do the work. And when working people finally understand that we have that power and we stand together, we don’t have to beg for our share. We can demand it. So, let’s spend the next year and a half getting ready. Let’s organize. Let’s educate. Let’s build solidarity.”
