This Is the Worst State to Work in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 13, 10:31AM EDT · Published Sep 12, 9:36AM EDT

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This Is the Worst State to Work in America — © Kruck20 / iStock via Getty Images

There are a large number of studies about which cities and states are best to work in. Among the most well-known are those from U.S. News and WalletHub. These are based on unemployment, job growth, job satisfaction, and the variety of industries. A news study uses different yardsticks, which rely primarily on whether a state is worker friendly.

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The new Oxfam America “Best and Worst States to Work in America 2021” used the measures of 1) wage policies, 2) worker protections, and 3) rights to organize. Each state is rated on a scale of 1 to 100 based on the grades for each of these three factors. OxFam is a nonprofit with the mission of lowering poverty. According to Becker’s Hospital Review’s analysis of the Oxfam research:

For its study, Oxfam looked at three categories: wages (40 percent of overall score), worker protections (35 percent) and the right to organize (25 percent).

Based on the Oxfam survey, the worst state to work, by far, is North Carolina with a score of 6.19. Among the reasons it rates so poorly is that it gets a zero for “right to organize”

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Left out of the analysis are several other important pieces of data. Among them is state unemployment. North Carolina’s at 4.4% in July, is well below the national average according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The median household income in North Carolina is well below the national number of $63,179 according to the Census Bureau. The North Carolina figure is $53,369. However, North Carolina also has among the lowest annual costs of living.

Across all of the studies of which are the best states to work (and, in some cases, to live), what is lost is that different media and organizations have not agreed on a standard set of measures. That means each survey has a built-in weakness, and also some bias. What someone makes in wages, or how they make it, is not a sufficient yardstick. Quality of life is another, and Oxfam has a very narrow view of what goes into that.

Click here to read about the best and worst states to live in.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.