North Carolina should celebrate its “best for business” win cautiously
This morning, North Carolina received big, exciting news: CNBC had ranked us the “Top State for Business.” Gov. Roy Cooper spoke about the honor with journalist Scott Cohn this morning in Wrightsville Beach. With the Atlantic Ocean in the background, Cooper doted on the state for its beauty and capability.
“We pulled together in a bipartisan way to make sure businesses know we have the most talented, educated workforce in the country,” Cooper said in the interview. “Talking to CEO after CEO, workforce is the driving force for them right now.”
The results are a big win for North Carolina, which has been in the Top 5 three times since 2017 and in the Top 10 for 13 of the 14 of the previous years. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed a slew of high-profile businesses — Apple, Toyota, and the Vietnamese car company Vinfast, to name a few — making moves to our state in the last year. We’ve been one of the fastest growing economies and work forces of the last year. We benefit from the sheer number of banks that call Charlotte home, as well as colleges and universities graduating more and more STEM students each year.
It’s a big win, a deserved win. But it’s a “win” that feels complicated.
Being the best state for business does not necessarily mean we are a state where everyone prospers. Yes, attracting businesses means attracting jobs and people to fill those jobs. But we spend a lot of money to get those jobs: Vinfast, for example, is receiving $1.2 billion in incentives to build their $2 billion car manufacturing plant in Chatham County. In exchange for Apple’s $1 billion campus in Research Triangle Park, the state is giving it as much as $846 million in incentives. While the state would still make a “profit” in both instances, they net result is considerably smaller than the state advertises.
North Carolina may be the top state for businesses, but it is the worst state to be a worker, according to a 2021 Oxfam America report. It ranked in the bottom three for wage policies, worker protections and rights to organize. It still uses the federal minimum wage, unlike the 30 states and Washington D.C. that have shifted to higher minimum wages since 2014.
The state’s win was attributed to “a bipartisan effort,” which is true — Republican leaders Tim Moore and Phil Berger worked closely with Cooper on the Vinfast agreement, for example. Republicans as a whole have done a lot to help attract business to the state, like slashing corporate income tax to zero. But it’s also true that Cooper’s veto alone keeps the state from enacting policies that hurt marginalized groups, something that ultimately hurt states like Mississippi, which finished last.
It seems that CNBC accounted for this in its analysis; NC lost points in the “workforce” category. In the methodology report, CNBC said it considered the number of STEM employees, training programs, and productivity per employee. The netword said it examined each states’ “right to work” laws, but did not mention whether having such a law in place would help or hurt the state. North Carolina performed worst in the “life, health, and inclusion” category for things that the editorial board has pointed out over the years: a lag in public health spending (like expanding Medicaid), hospital resources are sparse, and there aren’t enough protections for marginalized communities.
Again, this is something North Carolina should celebrate, and it seems like both Democrats and Republicans are doing just that. But as we point to the promise of booming businesses and the wins we do have, we should remember the precarious line we toe between “good for business” and “bad for the state.”
This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 6:27 PM.
