Oxfam's 2026 Best States to Work Index Ranks North Carolina Last Among 52 States and Territories

The Zero That Won't Move

North Carolina has finished last on Oxfam America's Best States to Work Index for seven years running. On September 7, 2026, the group released its ninth edition, and the state landed dead last again — 52nd out of 52 states, territories and D.C., with a score of 4.90 out of 100^[1][3][11].

Two months earlier, in July, CNBC put the same state second in the nation for business — its sixth straight year in the top two^[6]. One index says North Carolina is one of the worst places in the country to be a worker. The other says it's one of the best places in the country to run a company. Both are measuring the same state at the same time.

That's not a contradiction so much as two different scoreboards, built for two different audiences. Understanding why they diverge means understanding what each one actually counts — and what it leaves out.

What Oxfam Actually Counts

Oxfam's index doesn't measure pay, or how many people have jobs, or how workers say they feel about their work. It counts laws^[1][5]. Researchers check whether a state has passed any of 37 specific labor policies, then score three categories: wage policies worth 35% of the total, worker protections worth another 35%, and the right to organize and bargain collectively worth 30%^[1][2].

North Carolina scored 8.17 on wages, 5.83 on worker protections, and exactly 0.0 on the right to organize^[3][11]. That last number isn't a rounding error or a close call. It's structural. North Carolina General Statute 95-98, on the books since 1959, makes contracts between government bodies and public-employee unions void outright^[10]. No legislative majority currently in Raleigh intends to repeal it, so the zero will keep showing up every year no matter how the economy performs^[1][3].

North Carolina is also a "right-to-work" state, a separate law that bars any workplace contract from requiring an employee to join or pay dues to a union, even where a union already represents that workplace. Supporters say it protects individual workers from being forced to fund a group they didn't choose to join. Unions counter that it lets non-members receive the pay and benefits the union bargained for without paying anything toward winning them, which drains the union's funding and its leverage at the table. That's the argument underneath Oxfam's organizing-rights score: the group treats right-to-work as a negative, and business groups treat it as a selling point.

Add in the state's minimum wage — $7.25 an hour, the federal floor, unchanged since 2009 — and Oxfam's math produces the same bottom-of-the-list result year after year^[13]. About 20 states still sit at that federal rate^[13]. Union membership in North Carolina was about 2.5% of wage and salary workers in 2025, roughly 113,000 people, among the lowest shares in the country^[7].

A Number Two That Runs on Different Math

CNBC's business ranking isn't testing any of that. It weighs things employers pay for: tax burden, workforce supply, infrastructure, cost of doing business^[6]. Low labor costs and light regulation tend to push that score up. The same laws that produce Oxfam's zero — no state minimum wage above the federal floor, no path to public-sector bargaining — are, from an employer's perspective, part of what keeps North Carolina attractive.

The North Carolina Chamber's Gary Salamido has described the CNBC result as "sustained success built over time," the payoff of a consistent policy approach rather than luck^[6]. The state's own Department of Commerce reported that wages grew faster than inflation in 2025, and employment rose 0.8% from 2024 to 2025 — double the 0.4% national rate^[8].

So the gap between second-best and dead-last isn't necessarily one index catching something the other missed. It's two scoreboards measuring opposite things, by design^[1][6]. A policy that lowers labor costs for a company can, by the same motion, lower Oxfam's score for the workers on the other side of that transaction.

The Fight Over What "Best" Should Mean

Labor advocates argue that federal labor law hasn't moved in years, which means states are the level of government actually deciding whether low-wage workers get paid sick days, wage-theft enforcement, or a legal path to organize^[1][2]. On that test, they say, North Carolina has passed almost nothing — and a strong economy doesn't answer the complaint, because growth that isn't backed by law is only shared by hope, not by right. NC Newsline and similar outlets have pushed this contrast directly, running the two rankings side by side under headlines like "best for business, dead last for workers"^[4].

The John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Raleigh, argues Oxfam is measuring the wrong thing entirely. Its analyst Brian Balfour called the index "more of a left-wing progressive ideological wish list of interventionist policies rather than which states are actually creating jobs, creating opportunities and creating income growth for workers"^[5]. The group's evidence: North Carolina's cost of living runs below the national average, so a given paycheck buys more there than the raw dollar figure suggests. People keep moving to the state for work. The state added roughly 39,500 jobs in 2025 with wages outpacing inflation^[5][8]. And the minimum wage, they note, binds very few people — Carolina Journal put the figure at about 5% of the state's full-time workforce^[5].

Even Oxfam doesn't dispute the core description of its own method. The group has said plainly, "This index is supposed to just be a capture of the policies that do and don't exist"^[5]. The disagreement isn't over what the index measures. It's over whether that's the right thing to measure at all.

One State, Different Workers

The two rankings can both be true because they're not describing the same worker. A software engineer in Raleigh and a poultry-processing worker in Duplin County occupy different labor markets inside the same state. For higher earners, the state's job growth and lower housing costs are real, tangible gains.

For workers at the bottom of the wage scale, the practical facts are narrower: the wage floor has sat at $7.25 since 2009, there's no state paid sick leave law, and if that worker is employed by a city, county or school system, state law bars them from having a union contract at all^[10][13]. Average weekly wages in North Carolina were about $1,180 as of mid-2026, below the national average, even accounting for the state's below-average cost of living^[9][8]. Public-sector union advocates note that G.S. 95-98 was written in 1959, and argue its origins are worth weighing against its current effects.

Employers and site-selection consultants see the same setup from the other side: predictable costs and few mandates are exactly what makes a state easy to expand into, and a company competing for skilled workers already pays well above $7.25 regardless of what the floor says^[5][6]. Neither side disputes the underlying numbers. They disagree about which of them should carry more weight.

How the Story Got Told

Coverage of the ranking split largely along the same lines as the debate itself. Oxfam's own release framed North Carolina and Alabama as states that "lag far behind" the leaders — language that treats the ranking as if all 52 places were reaching for the same shared goal, when the index only scores whether a state passed the policies Oxfam favors^[1]. NC Newsline placed the Oxfam and CNBC results side by side under a headline pairing "best for business" with "dead last for workers," a framing that invites readers to draw a causal line between them that neither index actually tests^[4].

Carolina Journal's rebuttal led with Oxfam's identity — "Boston advocacy group" — without applying the same framing to its own parent organization, the Locke Foundation, even though its methodological critique was substantive^[5]. Local television coverage from CBS 17, WLOS and Fox Carolina largely reported Oxfam's numbers and category breakdowns as given, with limited independent scrutiny of the method and, in several cases, no response included from state officials or business groups^[3][11][14].

No non-Western outlets picked up the story in any meaningful way; coverage stayed almost entirely within North Carolina and national U.S. outlets^{[1][3][4][14]}. Oxfam times the release for the week before Labor Day every year, guaranteeing labor coverage while state legislatures are out of session — a pattern that has produced a statewide news cycle within a day of release for nine years running, without yet producing a change to the underlying law^{[1][3][4][11][14]}.