By Brian Hamilton
When I was in high school, I had a teacher who referred to the “mimeograph” machine when instructing kids to go and get copies. (Not many readers will remember this reference.) The kids used to make fun of him because the mimeograph machine had largely been replaced by the printer by the time I was in high school.
For the seventh year in a row, “Oxfam” has declared North Carolina as the worst state in America for workers. California, meanwhile, sits at No. 1, which is funny in several ways, not the least of which includes the fact that fewer and fewer people who have jobs actually want to live in California any longer.
The organization’s index evaluates state policies across three categories: wages, worker protections, and the right to organize. Oxfam acts like workers are in the same place they were 100 years ago, when my grandfather immigrated here from Ireland. They’ve developed a rubric for evaluating worker rights as if it were 1926, not 2026.
North Carolina’s population has grown from about 10.44 million at the 2020 census to an estimated 11.20 million in 2025 — a 7.2% increase. People are not being forced onto moving trucks and being driven into North Carolina. They are choosing to come here. Meanwhile, California’s population has declined by more than 200,000 over the same period. My dad used to say that people vote with their feet — and he was right.
If your measurement tells you that North Carolina is the worst place in America to work while millions of people are choosing to move here and stay here, you have to ask whether you are measuring anything meaningful. What exactly is Oxfam measuring?
The answer is policy. The study is a policy scorecard, not a measurement of how workers are actually living and doing.
Its wage category includes things such as the ratio of the minimum wage to the cost of living for a family of four. Its worker-protection category includes whether child labor laws are being maintained. Its organizing category looks at whether collective bargaining is allowed. These are 19th and barely even 20th century barometers.
Calling the resulting number a measure of the “best state to work” is more than a stretch.
Think about what is missing. Is the state creating jobs? Are wages actually going up? Are people able to move from an entry-level job into a better-paying one? Can someone start a business and build something of his or her own?
Those are important questions if you are trying to determine whether a state is a good place to work.
Consider that in July, North Carolina’s unemployment rate was 3.6%, compared with 4.1% nationally and 5.1% in California.
Instead, Oxfam spends a lot of time looking at what the government requires employers to do and whether unions have the legal framework they want. There is nothing wrong with having laws that protect workers. We need them, at times. But, laws are not the same thing as economic opportunity.
A worker does not need a union to have a good job. Workers need opportunity. They need employers that are willing to pay more because another company might hire them. They need the ability to learn a skill, change jobs, start a company or move up the economic ladder.
A healthy private sector creates jobs, and growing businesses have to compete for good people. We can see that competition happening in North Carolina. In 2024, 91,000 workers came to North Carolina from jobs in other states, while 74,000 workers left. The workers who came here earned an average of 4.5% more in their new North Carolina jobs.
That is what opportunity looks like. Employers have to compete for people, and workers have the ability to compete for better opportunities. That can be a pretty powerful form of worker protection.
Still, to be clear, North Carolina has plenty of work to do, particularly in rural communities and inner cities where economic opportunity has not kept pace with the growth we have seen in Charlotte and the Triangle.
But if we really care about workers, let’s measure outcomes instead of simply counting government policies, which have many positive virtues except one — they rarely work.
Oxfam has built a useful database of labor policies, but it should not tell people that North Carolina is the worst state in America for workers when they haven’t measured whether workers are actually doing well by relative material measures. Call it what it is: a rating for unions and government programs, not a measurement of worker outcomes, entrepreneurial opportunity, or private-sector job growth.
Maybe it’s time to put the mimeograph machine back where it belongs and start measuring the economy by how people are doing.
PS: Exactly who is “Oxfam,” anyhow…
Brian Hamilton is a nationally recognized entrepreneur and the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs and Sageworks, one of the country’s first fintech companies.
