RALEIGH – North Carolina is arguably the least-congenial state for labor unions. It’s no surprise that union leaders want to change the situation. I’d be surprised if they succeed, though.

There are multiple tracks to the unions’ efforts in the state. Consider these three as forming an illustrative but not exhaustive catalog of activities:

Political. Several out-of-state unions, most notably the Services Employees International Union (SEIU), have put significant resources into North Carolina political races in recent election cycles. Some of the money has flowed directly into the Democratic Party and its candidates, while went through the State Employees Association of NC (SEANC). As Chris Hayes of the Civitas Institute explained, the SEIU money in part financed hundreds of thousands of dollars in independent expenditures targeted at key legislative races in 2004 and 2006.

Legislative. SEANC’s board has just voted 47-10 to negotiate a formal affiliation with SEIU. The next step is to push legislation in the General Assembly allowing state employees to bargain collectively, which unions typically see as critical (contrary to popular belief, however, the former power of collective bargaining is not a necessary characteristic of a “labor union”). Parallel to this are efforts, even more unlikely at the moment, to chip away at North Carolina’s right-to-work law, which prohibits employees from being coerced into unions or obligated to pay dues to them.

There are good reasons to bet against legislators allowing collective bargaining any time soon, but the importance of the issue to some political constituencies shouldn’t be underestimated. In the Democratic primary to succeed Janet Cowell in a Raleigh-area district in the state senate, for example, both Josh Stein and Jack Nichols have found it necessary to endorse a collective-bargaining bill, though they disagree about its proper scope (Stein says it should apply to all public employees while Nichols argues for excluding city and county employees so as not to provoke the opposition of the local-government lobby in the legislature and thus heighten the hurdle to passage).

As Carolina Journal reported last year, the push for collecting bargaining in North Carolina government is not just a priority for some North Carolinians but also for the national unions. At the very least, expect the legislation to be filed again and again so that these unions will continue to see good reason to pour election-year money into the state.

Media. When you see front-page stories targeting employers for workplace risks or abusive hiring practices, more often than not you’d be right to assume that union organizers were sources for the reporters, if not the key source. That’s not to say that the stories are all bunk. It’s just to say that such media efforts have long been part of a strategy to break employer opposition to organizing efforts. There’s a not-so-subtle threat to file health or safety complaints aggressively in non-union shops.

Labor issues aren’t usually considered to be a big deal in North Carolina politics. Things change.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.