New NC AFL-CIO president Braxton Winston II sees opportunities to work with state GOP

NC AFL-CIO President Braxton Winston II speaks at the labor federation’s 2025 convention in Wilmington. (Photo by Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline)

North Carolina AFL-CIO president Braxton Winston II, a longtime Democratic activist in Charlotte, said he will fight for the rights of all workers regardless of political affiliation and sees opportunities for cooperation with the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

“You’re going to have a disproportionate level of investment to the upside in industry, both emerging industries as well as legacy industries, in North Carolina,” Winston said in an interview with NC Newsline. “I look forward to working with whoever is going to come to the table to make this state the number one state for both businesses and workers.”

Those initiatives could include helping to bring energy, transportation, and infrastructure investments into the state and advancing workforce development programs to match that growth, he said.

Winston, 42, was elected to lead the NC AFL-CIO at its Wilmington convention on Sept. 12, as longtime labor leader MaryBe McMillan departs the role. He won the election with roughly 86% of the vote against Rodney Hughes, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 3607.

A member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees as a union stagehand and grip, Winston said that he ran for NC AFL-CIO president at McMillan’s urging.

“When I got the phone call and she was retiring, I was taken aback, like everybody else around the world. I was also taken aback when she suggested I think about this position,” Winston said in his convention speech. “As it was said yesterday, over and over again, you saw something in me that I didn’t necessarily see in myself, so thank you for that.”

‘Determination to fight back’

McMillan, the first woman to serve as the state federation’s president, said she put an emphasis on building a “leaderful movement” during her time in office, working to welcome a wide variety of voices into the labor cause and helping them build the skills to become the best advocates the can be. “It’s really important to create opportunities for new leaders to emerge — this movement needs to build a movement for the future,” she said.

An officer of the NC AFL-CIO for 20 years and president for the past eight, McMillan said she’s proud to have helped achieve “major organizing victories” in her time in leadership.

In an interview with NC Newsline, she pointed to the Duke Graduate Student Union getting its first contract with the university just this year — after two years of negotiating and roughly a decade of organizing. And during the pandemic, the NC AFL-CIO helped back successful union efforts among workers at Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel and nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville.

“All those campaigns, they were able to win because they built a movement,” McMillan said. “It wasn’t just about the union, it was about how this would also benefit the community in terms of like, with Mission Hospital, that they’re advocating for better health care, lower staff-patient ratios, and they really built a coalition.”

Stepping down amid significant strife between unions and the federal government, she said she is “really encouraged” by the fire she’s seen from federal workers. Crackdowns on their unions and rights are fueling workers’ determination to fight back, McMillan said.

“I think there’s a real determination that even though we’re facing all these attacks, especially on the federal level, that we can make a difference, and now is the time more than ever for us to stand up and fight,” she said. “It’s on the one hand a challenging moment, but it’s also a real moment of opportunity.”

One of McMillan’s signature achievements was a successful resolution at the 2022 AFL-CIO convention urging labor leaders to invest in the South, where labor organizing has historically faced significant obstacles. The AFL-CIO’s national president, Liz Shuler, praised McMillan for working to create that focus on the South.

“It’s taken some time to get everything in place, but we are following through, and now everyone sees what you have seen for years, that there is a massive, massive opportunity to organize here in the South,” Shuler said.

McMillan said she will remain on to aid Winston in the transition for the next month and will continue to act as a labor advocate in her post-presidential life.

‘I decided to put my body on the line’

Coming into leadership as the labor movement faces some of its greatest challenges of the 21st century is an opportunity that excites Winston, even as he will be forced to confront the federal government head-on.

“In some cases, it seems to be an existential threat to unions and certainly is an attack on workers, period,” Winston said. “I take heed to the wins and losses that have occurred during many precarious times to understand that solidarity is the path forward, and sometimes those forces that seem to beat us down have ways of driving working people closer together.”

He is no stranger to resistance against the government, particularly in the Trump era. Winston drew national attention in 2016 after the fatal shooting by police of Charlotte man Keith Lamont Scott, which sparked citywide protests. A photo of Winston standing up to riot police, fist raised, as they fired tear gas into the crowd went viral, and he won election to the Charlotte City Council the following year.

“When a man was killed waiting for his kids to get off the school bus, I had to show up,” he said at the convention. “I decided to put my body on the line, I had decided to use my voice to speak up for others — largely because of the lessons I had been learning as I entered this movement.”

After concluding his term as a council member in 2023, Winston was nominated by the Democratic Party for labor commissioner in the 2024 election and earned 47.2% of the vote, though lost to Republican Luke Farley by 5.6 percentage points.

“As I was going around the state over the past two previous years running for commissioner of labor, what I’ve learned is that a lot of people don’t know what unions actually are in this state,” Winston said in the interview. “They only understand what they’ve heard — they’ve only been told that they should be afraid of unions.”

Part of the problem, Winston said, is a reticence among Democratic Party leadership to stand up for workers’ rights, a failure that struck him throughout the 2024 elections as he sought the labor commissioner’s office.

“To be completely honest, the Democratic Party leadership did not invest in talking about worker issues. They didn’t want to talk about fair pay, worker safety, and workers’ rights,” he said. “But the labor movement at the leadership of MaryBe had a comprehensive plan on how to do that, and I felt those effects all across the state as I traveled.”

In a state with the lowest union participation rate in the U.S. at just 2.4%, building a successful labor movement can be a herculean task. But, Winston said, “there’s nothing more American than the idea of a union — it says it right there in the preamble of the Constitution.”

“We all work for somebody, and we understand that if work together and collectively, we can have better leverage over our bosses and managers,” he added. “Going and having those conversations, educating people about what labor is all about, is an important thing.”

He added that it was “excellent” to see political leaders in the state join union organizers at this year’s convention and give remarks backing labor rights — most prominently Gov. Josh Stein and state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.

“The ability to garner political power is certainly important and we’re going to look to do that all across this state, whether that’s in state government or in our local halls of government as well. Everybody can be partners to this,” Winston said.

The midterm elections will be a focus for the union, Winston said, but for now his priority is learning the “nuts and bolts” of leading the state’s largest labor federation from McMillan during the transition period.