From MaryBe McMillan, secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina State AFL-CIO:

Some national unions say they'll skip the Democratic National Convention because it is being held in North Carolina, the least unionized state. Unfortunately, ignoring anti-labor North Carolina won't help workers here or anywhere else.

It's no surprise that Wisconsin is becoming more like North Carolina and that Boeing left Washington for South Carolina. Labor's disregard of the South has hurt working people and unions everywhere. Because workers in the South have the least union representation, they also have the lowest wages and the fewest worker protections.

My hometown of Hickory has lost more jobs due to trade than just about anywhere else in the country. The furniture factories and hosiery mills are boarded up, casualties of NAFTA and CAFTA. The unemployed wonder what kind of future they can afford if the only jobs available are at Wal-Mart or the local mall.

One would think that workers in Hickory and other southern towns have been shortchanged for so long that they would demand that elected officials finally look out for their interests. But instead, the South traditionally elects policymakers who vote time and again against workers' interests. These votes hurt all working families, not just Southerners.

If labor leaders want a more worker-friendly Congress, then the South matters, and workers in the South need to believe that change is possible. Unions have largely chosen not to invest in the South, and as a result, there is no labor movement in many areas to challenge the status quo.

Sure, our state laws make it hard to organize, but in order to change the laws, we need to change attitudes. The labor movement must win the hearts and minds of workers not just in California and New York, but also in my hometown and small towns across the South. Because if we don't, we will see the repressive laws of the South spread beyond Wisconsin and Ohio into other traditional union strongholds.

The good news is North Carolina elected a more progressive U.S. senator, and in a narrow victory, our state went blue in the presidential election for the first time since 1976.

Workers at the world's largest pork slaughterhouse, Smithfield Packing Company in Tar Heel, N.C. felt so empowered by those electoral victories that one month later, in December 2008, they finally won their union after 16 long years of struggle. The workers had a slogan leading up to the union election: "We won the White House so we can win the hog house."

We could have more victories like the one at Smithfield. We could make North Carolina a more hospitable state for workers - but only if national labor leaders are willing to invest here.

Workers in Charlotte hotels and the convention center would be better off if they had the strength of union membership, but I welcome the convention and the national spotlight it will bring.

Democratic leaders understand that it's time for the growing South to come out of the shadows. I can only hope that national labor leaders realize it as well.