North Carolina Labor Commissioner Luke Farley ran for office vowing to “make elevators great again.”
And in 2025, the Republican’s first year on the job, he made good on his MEGA promise, eliminating a nagging backlog of uninspected lifts that numbered in the thousands.
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Inspecting elevators isn’t the only job of the labor office. It’s also tasked with enforcing workplace safety rules and investigating on-the-job deaths and injuries, wage theft, claims of retaliation and more. But the commissioner’s photo is in every elevator in the state, making those safety inspections a particularly high-profile part of the job. And while not everyone works in a dangerous field, riding on elevators is a near-universal experience.
The backlog became serious enough that in 2023, WRAL Investigates wrote about the state’s 5,000 uninspected elevators under former Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson, a Republican who didn’t seek reelection in 2024. While heading to a 2023 interview, WRAL found at the time that even the elevators inside the state labor offices were past due for safety inspections.
There were injuries and other incidents related to the inspection backlog, WRAL reported, such as a pregnant woman falling because her elevator stopped at an angle, sending her tumbling.
The labor department, like all state agencies, is understaffed, Farley says. Low pay, dwindling benefits and a strong private-sector job market have all combined in recent years to make it difficult for the state to hire and keep employees across agencies.
Dobson blamed under-staffing for the backlog. Farley told WRAL in an extensive interview that he’s still struggling with vacancies but came into office in 2025 and made it clear the problems needed to be fixed.
“About one in five elevators was not being inspected annually,” he said. “And so the first way you fix that is through leadership, and say, ‘It's unacceptable for us to have a program where we only are effective about 80% of the time.’”
The labor commissioner’s office can be a political minefield. It’s been held for decades by Republicans and is often a target of more liberal worker advocates or political opponents who allege any manner of things — ignored worker complaints, turning a blind eye to wage theft, going easy on noncompliant companies.
Farley has tried to keep from giving political foes that kind of ammunition. His 2024 general election opponent Braxton Winston told WRAL he met with Farley and some top aides late last year, in Winston’s new role leading the state chapter of the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions that advocates for workers. They had a constructive talk, Winston said.
Winston says he would’ve taken some different approaches if he were in office, but he said Farley seems to be taking worker safety seriously. Although labor unions and Republican politicians are often at odds, Braxton said he’s hoping the state government and the AFL-CIO can work together on some common goals.
“To build worker power, to work on behalf of all workers — not just union members — that means building relationships with legislators and members of the executive branch to work on laws, to work on spending, work on policies,” Winston said in an interview.
In recent years Republican President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has shied away from some of the pro-business stances that previous GOP leaders embraced, instead leaning into a more populist posture. In 2024 most labor unions endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris, but national reporting has indicated that many individual union members backed Trump despite those endorsements.
Farley copied Trump’s MAGA messaging with his “Make Elevators Great Again” slogan and won. Farley defeated Winston with 53% of the vote, better than Trump’s showing in North Carolina.
Winston said he harbors no ill will about how that election went down. “I’m a big fan of democracy,” he said. “There's winners and there's losers, and you move on from that.”
Winston added that he’s grateful Farley agreed to sit down with him and other AFL-CIO organizers, to hear them out. He noted that when the Labor Department established a new task force on heat-related injuries last year, Farley included a representative for the Teamsters union along with pro-business interests.
“There's much room to improve in North Carolina — whether you're talking about pay, benefits, working conditions and, of course, worker safety,” Winston said. “And so in that vein, I reached out to Commissioner Farley after I got this position. And in fact, he and I have been able to have good communication.”
Workplace safety
After spending his first year addressing the elevator backlog, Farley is now turning his sights to workplace safety.
He told WRAL he has a specific goal in mind for the next two years of his four-year term: Tackling the new leading cause of workplace deaths — one he said has been spurred on by the boom in the logistics and shipping industry, and massive new warehouses, distribution centers and manufacturing plants popping up around the state.
The number of people killed after being struck by a forklift, a falling box, moving tools or some other hazard has risen nearly 50% in just three years. In 2023, those incidents killed 17 workers statewide. That figure rose to 20 deaths in 2024 and 25 deaths in 2025.
Acknowledging that he’s still dealing with a shortage of workplace inspectors, he said he uses data to decide where to deploy those inspectors, and warehouses are a top priority. “We can't be everywhere all at one time, so we have to be smart about where we send our inspectors,” he said. “But this trend that we're trying to address, the ‘struck-by’ accidents, is alarming.”
Farley said it’s directly tied to the recent boom North Carolina has seen in the shipping and logistics industries. More and more people are getting jobs in large warehouses where there’s an immense focus on speed and efficiency. But efficiency shouldn’t come at the cost of workers’ lives, he said.
“You drive up and down [Interstate] 40 or 85 and there's one of these popping up everywhere — distribution centers,” Farley said in an interview in Mebane. “Here in this county, Food Lion is building a 1.5 million square foot facility. You see UPS, Amazon. That's what's driving it. And that's where we need to get the numbers down.”
For the next year, Farley said, his focus will be purely on education. State officials will meet with plant managers, offering tips on best practices. But after that year is up, he said, the fines will start flowing to any businesses that haven’t ensured their workers are safe.
“We're going to give employers the opportunity to get their own house in order, so to speak,” he said. “But at the end of this year, I made it very clear: the targeted enforcement is coming. And so either folks bring down those injuries and deaths themselves, or we're going to do it through enforcement.”