Going down: Elevator pictures of NC labor commissioners

The most iconic thing about the North Carolina labor commissioner’s office is going down: His mug on elevator inspection certificates.

Those pictures — the ones that stare at you while you try to avoid eye contact with strangers — had become such a mainstay North Carolina life and politics that Labor Commissioner Josh Dobson’s predecessor, Cherie Berry, was widely known as “The Elevator Queen.”

Dobson, who won office in 2020 after Berry retired, said he never really embraced the practice. So when the certification form was redesigned to add a new sentence, he dropped the picture.

Berry, who has moved to Ohio, took the news hard.

“Whaaaaaaat?” she said Monday, when reached by phone in a grocery store checkout line.

“I think it’s a mistake, but hey that’s just me,” Berry said.

Dobson will be a one-term commissioner, having announced late last year that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024. He said Monday that the Department of Labor, which handles elevator inspections and a wide-range of other jobs, updated the inspection form earlier this year to make it clear certifications don’t expire. They stay “in effect until the next periodic inspection,” according to a sentence added to the new form.

WRAL News reported in September that nearly 5,000 elevators, escalators and lifts — including an elevator at the Department of Labor itself — were past due for annual safety inspections. Dobson blamed rapid growth in the state and the difficulty of keeping inspector positions filled.

Most state agencies have struggled with hiring and retaining employees in recent years. Vacant positions in state agencies have hovered near historic levels.

The new forms are making their way into elevators around the state as new inspections are completed. Dobson said the pictures made people focus more on him instead of Department of Labor employees and that he wants the focus “on them and the hard work they do.”

Berry added her picture in about 2005. Some pointed out that it amounted to free campaign advertising, but Berry said she never heard anyone but her political opponents complain.

“The public loved it,” she said. “We did it because we wanted people to know there’s an actual person, they could put a face to government. But it kind of grew into a thing.”

Berry’s image became so ubiquitous that she inspired a song by a band called “Tha Commissioners," who exclaimed that their unbridled love for her was “so scary — the way I gotta trust you,” noting that she was the “last thing I see in the workplace.”

Whoever succeeds Dobson in the job may bring the pictures back, and Dobson said he wouldn’t fault them if they do.

So far the race has drawn three announced candidates. Charlotte Mayor Pro Tempore Braxton Winston is the lone Democrat. Two Republicans have announced: State Rep. Jon Hardister and Luke Farley, an attorney who borrowed his “Make Elevators Great Again” campaign slogan from former President Donald Trump.

Winston didn’t immediately return messages seeking comment.

Hardister, R-Guilford, who has Dobson’s endorsement in the race, said Monday that he’d have to think about whether he’d bring back the pictures if elected.

For Farley, who Berry has endorsed, there’s no question. People don’t know much about who’s responsible for state government, he said, and without those pictures they'll know less.

“It’s a tradition that I think people expect to be continued,” he said.

As for Berry, she lives in Toledo now to be closer to her daughter and 11-year-old grandson. She’s happy, she said, but not being The Elevator Queen anymore is a little bittersweet.

“This is a neat place to be too, but I really, really, really miss the people of North Carolina,” she said.