Corporations are on the move.
Chevron is planning to sell its headquarters in San
Ramon, California.
Tesla is relocating its headquarters from California
to Texas. Companies are rapidly moving people and
operations to Florida, including Elliott
Management, Blackstone, Citadel, Goldman Sachs.
Many states are offering companies enticing
incentives like lower taxes if they bring their jobs to
new homes.
Companies are choosing Texas because it has the superior
business climate.
But a superior business climate doesn't always
equate to a superior working climate.
Things that benefit employers when it comes to
their bottom line or their margin, they can directly
conflict with things that benefit actual employees.
Some of the states with the most attractive business
incentives have been passing controversial social
policies, such as LGBTQ restrictions, limiting
voting access and preventing schools and
employers from holding diversity and inclusion
trainings.
These policies do affect whether people are deciding
to relocate and where they're going to locate.
People also take other factors into consideration
when deciding where to work.
It was cost of living, weather, culture and fourth,
of course, where we could get a job.
With the Northwest and Seattle and I guess the West
Coast in general, the cost of living has gone up so
exponentially.
We're still in a very tight labor market where workers
still have a lot of power and the ability to be picky.
So which states are the worse for workers, and how
can companies in those states attract top talent?
The Best States to Work Index was a project that we
created in 2017 as a way to understand what states were
stepping into the vacancy left by the federal
government when it came to support for workers and
working families.
The Best States to Work Index thinks about three big
themes for how workers and working families are
supported: wages, worker protections and rights to
organize. The worst states to work are in the South
almost always.
And in 2021, the worst state to work was North
Carolina. The second to worst state was Georgia.
And then in order, Mississippi, Alabama, South
Carolina.
North Carolina ranked first on CNBC's 2022 Top States
for Business Index for its strong overall economy,
large access to capital and a solid housing market.
But North Carolina scored in the bottom half of CNBC's
Rankings for Life, Health and Inclusion for its lack
of discrimination protections and low per
capita public health spending.
Just as when you look at company offerings and look
at the benefits, you need to also really look at
states and think of, what do you prioritize?
What are you, unfortunately, willing to
sacrifice in order to get the best protections for
what you need?
Lauren Perine had moved from Pittsburgh to Boston for a
job in 2019, but she quickly realized Boston
wasn't a good fit for her.
It was pretty early on too.
I think it was like one or two months in, I went to my
manager and said, Hey, just so you know, I'm not going
to want to be here in a year or two.
And so it was kind of talking with them early on
about transferring maybe to another city such as
Atlanta, which is where I originally wanted to go.
Oxfam America ranked Georgia as one of the worst states
for worker protections, but Perine valued community and
mentorship she found in Atlanta over the liberal
legal protections in Boston.
I wanted to move somewhere where I saw people that
looked like me, people that were in the spaces I was in,
that were also in tech, that we had similar
interests. And so far I would say with Atlanta, it's
been really easy to get plugged in here and just
meet people and make friends.
A partisan divide has formed on labor policies.
State-level Democrats are more likely to pass the
sorts of policies Oxfam America is tracking.
One really good example of that would be the state of
Virginia, which in 2019 was dead last in our index, went
from dead last to 23rd.
And the reason for that is because there was new
representation in Virginia and there was a lot of new
policies that were passed in Virginia that really
helped workers and working families.
There was a heightened minimum wage, protections
for domestic workers, there was expanded protection of
unionization for teachers.
So when policies change, it really, really affects the
index ranking.
And the private sector paid attention.
In 2019, Amazon engaged in a high-profile search for
the best location to build its second headquarters.
They got hundreds and hundreds of applications
from all of these different cities and states that were
throwing enormous tax breaks at them.
And at the end of the day, it seems like the driver of
their decision wasn't who could offer them the largest
tax break, but instead, what does the talent
ecosystem in that community look like?
And a huge factor that they cited when they chose
Virginia was that this is a state that has a very good
higher education system.
It had made a large commitment to creating a
sustainable tech talent pipeline to fill the jobs
that Amazon was going to need.
We have a robust workforce that includes one of the
strongest pools of tech talent in the nation.
And so companies need to find communities that
actually are investing in their people that are going
to be the human capital that fuels their growth and
productivity.
There's a lot to really think about.
Everyone has their own preferences.
Everyone has their concoctions of what they
need.
The states with good worker protection laws may also
have downsides for working people: high Costs of
living. Oxfam America ranked Oregon, New York,
Massachusetts and California as some of the
best states for workers rights.
But CNBC's 2022 Top States for Business Index ranked
those states as some of the worst when it comes to costs
of living.
If you look at where we were living in Boston, it was
like a 300 square foot shoebox of an apartment
across from Fenway Stadium for about $1800 a month.
Dusty Darnold is originally from the Chicago area, but
he's bounced between Seattle, Los Angeles and
Illinois since graduating from college in 2007.
The cost of living in Seattle and just the West
Coast in general has gone up so significantly.
It just made sense from a financial standpoint and
taking into consideration a family perspective, just to
be here in Illinois.
Feeling comfortable in an area also plays a big role.
To me, I am Black first and just the ability to have a
culture and community and the safety and that, a lot
of these laws really aren't going to help me.
A lot of the people that I work with are in chocolate
cities. The biggest factor can be do they feel like
they can belong?
So it may be Atlanta but may not be a lot of places
in Georgia. It may specifically be New York
City, it may be specifically Dallas or
Houston when it comes to Texas, or even Washington,
D.C. So it's not necessarily about the full
state.
It's common for companies to flee high tax states for
states that are considered more business friendly, such
as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.
But the states that offer these incentives are also
more likely to pass contentious laws on social
issues, as well as have the weakest worker protection
laws. One high profile example of these social
policies is abortion.
About eight in ten of top talent did not want Roe v.
Wade overturned.
These are adults 18 to 64 years old who have a college
degree, who are in the workforce or actively
looking for a job.
More than a dozen states have either severely
restricted or outright banned abortion after the
Supreme Court overruled Roe v.
Wade. Corporate America felt a need to address it.
Many companies are also coming out in support of
workers by now offering to pay for abortion travel
expenses, including memos to employees from J.P.
Morgan and Disney assuring t hey will pay for those
costs.
The public statements of support suggests that
companies may be concerned about attracting top talent.
The CEO of Duolingo tweeted, If Pennsylvania
makes abortion illegal, we won't be able to attract
talent and we'll have to grow our offices elsewhere.
There may be something to that concern.
63% of potential top talent surveyed said it would
discourage them from relocating to a state where
politicians banned abortion.
If a work opportunity took us to a state that did not
have access to those types of rights, we would very
strongly consider not moving there because, you
know, we have a daughter who we feel should be able
to make decisions regarding her own body.
There are a number of things that workers are looking for
when they think about considering different
employment opportunities and that companies have to
consider when they're recruiting talent for jobs.
Where I'm going to be free from discrimination, a
culture where I feel valued and have the ability to have
purpose and feel like I'm contributing to the
organization.
But companies making statements about abortion
access may be about more than reassuring employees.
I think that companies are more so interested in the
consumer opinion than actually enacting change.
What we saw in 2020 was a lot of companies putting
black squares on their social media and a lot of
companies promising to invest into Black talent.
That same energy is not shared two years later.
The reality is, most Americans aren't actually
moving.
Geographic mobility declined during the onset of the
pandemic. If your social structure and community are
embedded in one place and have been for a long time,
you're actually pretty unlikely to move.
And the long run trends in the United States is
actually that geographic mobility has been declining,
that fewer people have been moving across state lines.
The last five years or so really taught me the
privilege that I have.
Not everybody has that same accessibility to be able to
just bounce wherever they want to go move to.
Remote work may be an option for some companies so their
headquarters can remain in low tax states while
employees can live wherever they please.
But that's not the case for all workers.
The population of workers that can work remotely is
highly skewed towards higher educated, higher wage
jobs. And for a lot of people in this country, even
though they would like to have that flexibility,
they're in roles, whether it be in manufacturing or in
hospitality or in retail, where remote work hasn't
been an option.
A lot of these corporations that do need to attract the
top talent tend to have headquarters in places that
are very appealing and tend to have, if this applies to
them, warehouses in places that are significantly less
appealing and perhaps have more lenient policies when
it comes to paid leave or lower wages, or do not
enshrine the right to organize.
States passing these social policies, such as
restricting abortion, may hurt employers and the
economy in the long run.
Majority of adults in the country want abortion legal
in all or most cases, didn't want Roe overturned.
For most people, abortion is not about a procedure.
It's about who has power and control over your body
and about these decisions.
And I think voters see it very much as a proxy for a
bunch of other things.
Limiting abortion access can have negative impacts on
women's career advancement and in some cases caused
them to leave the workforce entirely.
This can also have significant consequences for
the overall economy.
The growth of the U.S.
economy has actually really been dependent enormously on
increasing rates of women entering the workforce.
Declining labor force participation of women is
really bad news for the U.S.
economy. We need women in the workforce to drive
growth and drive productivity.
Companies recognize the importance of a diverse
workforce.
Better diversity is better products, period, right?
You're able to understand the different perspectives,
you're able to understand the blind spots, you're able
to reach different audiences.
A lot of what we see in America was not built for
the economic benefit of people of color or uplifting
of women. These were systems that were built to
benefit white men.
As human rights has evolved, we need to really
revisit the systems that were actually created to
exclude people.