Many heads were likely scratched by their confused owners this month as media publicized a ranking by OXFAM, which placed North Carolina last of all 50 states (plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico) in terms of how its workers are treated. So out of the 52 states, districts, and territories analyzed, North Carolina placed 52nd. Judging by this one ranking, workers here must be suffering some pretty extreme conditions. And somehow North Carolina has managed to achieve this distinction five years in a row.
Your typical news consumer is also likely to remember that, in recent years, our state has frequently ended up on the opposite side of the spectrum, as the top of the top, on rankings of which states were best for business. The conclusion they may draw is that we’re a great place for businesses to make a buck, but it’s only at the expense of worker rights, wages, and safety.
As is often the case with rankings of this kind, the ranker’s embedded biases predetermine the outcome, like asking a vegan to name the top restaurants in town or a Taylor Swift fan to list the best songs of all time. Basically, to repeat a common phrase about studies in general: garbage in, garbage out. And the factors OXFAM used to judge North Carolina as a dystopian hellscape for workers are largely garbage.
Before diving into those specific factors a bit, it’s usually helpful to take a step back and look at the big picture. If all the “best for business” charts have a certain group of states at the top (Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee) and a certain group at the bottom (New York, California, Oregon, Illinois), and then the “best for workers” charts simply switch the two groups, where does that leave us?
The fact that both businesses AND workers are flocking to the “best for business” states and fleeing the “best for workers” ones gives a big hint on which metric matters more, since people tend to vote with their feet and go where they have the best opportunities and standard of living.
The OXFAM analysis does little to make me question this initial big-picture impression (that workers don’t typically stampede out of places that are great to work towards places that are terrible to work). Their three main metrics for judging us so harshly are wage policies, worker protections, and rights to organize. And, as you’ll see, in each category, OXFAM penalizes North Carolina for policies that are far from “anti-worker.”
Wage policies
In the first category, wage policies, they particularly dinged us for not requiring more than the federal $7.25 minimum wage. Many other states also do not require more than the federal requirement, but because we have a slightly higher cost of living than these states (Kansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, etc), a family of four would have a harder time living comfortably off of that wage.
But this ignores pretty much everything we know about the minimum wage. First, only around 1.1% of workers make at or below the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are also twice as likely to be working part time than a typical worker, meaning they are not likely to be a sole breadwinner.
The BLS notes in their latest data that “Nearly 8 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2023 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving-related jobs. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received.”
As anyone who has worked in a service job of this sort knows, that base pay is not what you’re relying on for your actual take-home pay. So removing this 80% of 1.1% leaves about 0.2% of workers making this minimum or below. The BLS data also shows that those who are working for minimum wage are twice as likely to never have been married and around half are in their teens or early 20s.
So these 0.2% of workers are likely in a kind of internship situation or on-the-job training to get their foot in the door as a long-term strategic move, not typically a full-time single-income supporting a family of four. Workers of that kind in our state have much better options than the minimum wage.
There are starting positions at gas stations, Walmart, fast food restaurants, construction companies, and countless other businesses that are begging for workers to accept $15 an hour because of worker shortages and wage inflation that has even outpaced overall inflation. The average wage at Walmart today in North Carolina is $29, according to Zip Recruiter. An offer of $7.25 would be promptly shredded by even the least-skilled teen temp worker.
Judging our state to be bad for workers based on a minimum wage that is irrelevant to 99.8% of workers is pretty weak.
Worker protections
The second of three categories was worker protections — another where our state ranked 51st out of 52. There were so many items in the checklist that I won’t attempt to discuss them in any detail. Some of them seem like they could increase the safety and dignity of workers, but many seem burdensome or unnecessary.
With employers flooding out of states that check all these boxes and into ones that don’t, it begs the question: Could pursuing every conceivable item on the labor movement’s checklist force companies to flee for greener pastures? If so, is there a point of diminishing returns, where each new regulation does little to improve a workers’ job but a lot to threaten it?
Right to organize
The last category makes clear that when they speak about being a good state for workers, they have only certain workers in mind. For example, states are dinged for having “right-to-work” laws. But those laws simply prevent unions from forcing workers to pay dues. If someone wants to join a union, more power to them (unless it’s a public sector union, which we’ll talk about in a second). But if a worker and an employer want to create an employment contract with no labor union involved, they should have that right.
The analysis also calls for mandates requiring that “contacts for public construction projects must go exclusively to unionized firms.” Sure, that sounds “good for workers” if you are part of a unionized firm. But if you’re one of the 97% of North Carolina’s workers who aren’t, a law of this kind would discriminate against you.
OXFAM also penalized states if they don’t have teachers unions and other public-sector unions. But public-sector unions are notorious for making government more expensive, less efficient, and less reliable. The workers negotiate against the tax payer and strike by refusing to deliver public services. This can lead to everything from children being suddenly without supervision to unsanitary trash piling up on corners.
There are also no clear limits to what public employees can reasonably demand. If a private-sector union demands something that would put the business under, the boss can draw a red line. But, as we’ve seen with the state- and municipal-pension crises, governments let public-sector unions twist their arms into promising benefits that the taxpayer will be unable to provide. Those taxpayers are also known as all the other workers.
So, North Carolina laws regarding unions — basically that government employees cannot unionize and private-sector workers only have to join a union if they want to — are in fact pro worker. And the state as a whole is owed an apology for this one-sided slander of the nation’s top state for business… and probably the top state for workers too, since having more businesses leads to more job opportunities for workers.