‘We Need to Fight’: Union Organizing Booms in US Outdoor Industry

March 14, 2024

North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway is “basically a nightmare” for labor unions. That’s according to organizers with the AFL-CIO, who faced a tough fight in 2023 to gain representation of all 160 workers stretched across the National Park’s 469 miles of mountain terrain.

It’s difficult to meet with all the park’s workers when you can only talk to a few of them every few miles.

That wasn’t the only difficulty. An anti-union group called The National Right to Work Foundation tried to stymie efforts to increase labor representation in the park. “Union officials in both the public and private sectors want to maintain their coercive grip on workplaces across the country,” the group’s president, Mark Mix, said at the time. GJ