Under the Dome podcast: NC Labor Commissioner Luke Farley on elevators, raises and DEI
Start your week in North Carolina politics with our latest Under the Dome podcast, for the week of Feb. 17, 2025. Dawn Vaughan here, your podcast host and The News & Observer’s Capitol bureau chief. Today’s Under the Dome newsletter is a preview of our new podcast that posted this morning.
I’m joined by new Labor Commissioner Luke Farley, a Republican. We talk about everything from elevators to the Labor Building itself to the 10% raises he wants for inspectors to eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in his agency to getting Cherie Berry’s endorsement and more.
Here are a few highlights:
▪ Farley on the Berry endorsement in the primary: “We became friends, she became a mentor, and ultimately endorsed me in the race. And as a new candidate, that was huge at the time, because in politics I was unknown, and it instantly gave the campaign credibility, because nobody knows the job of labor commissioner better than Cherie Berry, because she did it longer than anybody else ever has.”
▪ On workplace safety inspector and elevator inspector vacancies: “It is hard for us to do our job if we don’t have a fully staffed department. We have both elevator inspector vacancies that need to be filled, but maybe even more importantly than that, we have workplace safety inspector vacancies that need to be filled.”
“It’s hard to keep the workers of North Carolina safe if we don’t have enough inspectors. And so we immediately started getting to work on that.”
▪ Farley on the raises he’s asking for from the General Assembly: “We are seeking a 10% pay raise for those inspectors.”
“I come out of the private sector, and if there are vacancies that are sitting open for a long period of time, the first thing you have to ask yourself is, are the pay and benefits competitive with the market?”
▪ On where Labor Department employees work: “There are some positions that are truly remote workers because they work in the field all the time. Our elevator inspectors do not work out of an office, because they are out in the field inspecting elevators. They basically have a mobile office. ... But we are doing sort of a top to bottom review of HR policies in the department, including work from home policies, because I do think the taxpayers expect us to be in this office.”
▪ On replacing diversity, equity and inclusion metrics with safety and health metrics:
“We did have some DEI metrics for evaluating employees, and I decided that we’re going to be a department that’s focused on merit, and we were going to use something else. ... We’ve replaced DEI with a different metric, and so we replaced it with safety and health, which to me, is really significant because half of the work of the department relates to workplace safety. And so we are now holding ourselves to the same standard that we expect of the employers in this state that we regulate,” Farley said.
You can listen to much more of the conversation on all those topics above, as well as how Farley’s questions at his first Council of State meeting led to a change in the schedule of those meetings for statewide officials.
Headliner of the Week
Stay tuned until the end for our picks for Headliner of the Week. I talk about the Senate Democratic Caucus divide during the first Senate voting session, and Farley talks about the very first new inspection certificate in a North Carolina elevator. You’ll never guess what building it’s in.
There’s much more on the episode, so listen to the full recording and previous episodes, which are embedded at the end of our stories and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Audible, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon Music and Stitcher.
.jpg)