Union bosses push Charlotte leaders to impose mandate that violates state law.
North Carolina legislators have been national trendsetters in enacting pro-growth tax relief, but local leaders across the state have been taking a different approach, raising taxes in order to grow county and municipal budgets more rapidly than the rate of population growth plus inflation. Take Charlotte, where local officials have pushed for property and sales tax hikes in recent years in order to fund unsustainable growth in local spending. If that weren’t bad enough, the Service Employee International Union (SEIU), is now pushing the Charlotte City Council to pass an ordinance that would punish a major employer in the area, one that is planning to spend billions of private dollars on public infrastructure improvements, with new locally-imposed mandates that will drive up labor costs.
The company is American Airlines, which is currently in the process of negotiating with Charlotte City Council on a new long-term lease for their operations at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT), where one of the airline’s hubs is currently located. The SEIU, a behemoth labor union that overwhelmingly backs Democratic politicians and progressive policies, has been pushing members of the Charlotte City Council for more than a year to pass an ordinance making the approval of American Airlines’ new lease at CLT contingent upon the imposition of new wage and benefit concessions from American Airlines. Aside from the significant costs that locally mandated wage and benefit increases would impose on one of the city’s largest employers, what the SEIU is asking the Charlotte City Council to do is also a violation of state law.
“State law prohibits dictating wages for workers employed by private companies operating at city-owned locations like the airport, interim City Attorney Anthony Fox said, citing the state’s Wage and Hour Act,” the Charlotte Observer reported after the 2025 council meeting during which the SEIU proposed the aforementioned ordinance. “Another state statute regarding contractors also restricts the city’s ability to impose wage regulations on companies providing services under contract, Fox said. And, he said, cities are prohibited from recognizing or negotiating with unions, further limiting Charlotte’s involvement in employee pay.”
North Carolina lawmakers preempted locally-imposed or locally-negotiated wage mandates for good reason. The same logic behind statewide preemption of local labor mandates applies to the push for federal preemption of state-level AI regulations. The U.S. would become a much less attractive location for AI developers if they have to contend with a nationwide patchwork of 50 different state-level AI regulatory regimes. Likewise, North Carolina’s law preempting a patchwork of varying local wage and benefit mandates makes North Carolina a less costly and more predictable place for employers of all sizes and from all sectors of the economy.
What’s more, Charlotte taxpayers would end up being forced to fund a legal defense of the SEIU-proposed ordinance should the City Council cave to the union’s pressure and pass it. Given the additional costs it would mandate and the legal challenge it would be unlikely to survive, members of the Charlotte City Council would be wise to reject the SEIU’s push to extract costly concessions from a company that employs approximately 15,000 people at CLT and is planning to invest billions of dollars in further buildout of public infrastructure at the airport.
