I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
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North Carolina wages are climbing. Data this month from the state Commerce Department shows every sector saw pay increases from 2024 to 2025, with the “information” sector leading the way. Average weekly wages rose 4.1% statewide, 1.4% when adjusted for inflation.
But this year, one employee group saw their earnings fall 31% — and that’s before factoring inflation. North Carolina is halfway through its first full growing season under a new U.S. Department of Labor rule that reduced what migrant farmworkers on H-2A visas make.
The minimum wages for the more than 20,000 temporary workers who come (mostly from Mexico) to North Carolina farms went from $16.16 an hour in late 2024 to $12.69 this year. Employers under the new rule can now deduct housing costs from workers’ pay, which dropped most H-2A hourly wages to $11.09.
“(Workers) weren’t happy about it,” said Bill Harrell, president of the family-farm corporation Agrarian Inc. in the Wilson County town of Stantonsburg. “I’m not going to say they were.”
Born on the farm he now runs, Harrell told me he has employed H-2A workers since the 1990s. His Eastern North Carolina farm currently has 139 of these temporary employees. Some H-2A workers have returned to Agrarian for years, Harrell said, to handpick cucumbers, banana peppers, tobacco, watermelon and sweet potatoes. Others for decades.
But when it came to pay, Harrell believes the H-2A wage had gotten too high. The minimum rate was $10.72 in 2016, then rose 33% over the next eight years.
In late 2025, Harrell was one of multiple North Carolina farmers to join industry groups like the N.C. Sweetpotato Commission and the N.C. Apple Growers Association in submitting comments to the Labor Department in favor of adjusting how the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (which determines H-2A pay) gets calculated. AEWR is intended to prevent H-2A workers from suppressing U.S. farmworkers wages. By lowering the U.S. comparison wage inputted into the formula, guest workers’ pay fell.
“There seem to be fewer U.S. workers interested in working on a farm each year,” the apple growers association wrote DOL. “And the ones who still will are not being ‘adversely affected’ by the premium wages being paid to H-2A workers.”
H-2A wages carry particular weight in North Carolina. The state employs the fifth most H-2A workers in the nation, one spot ahead of Texas. Our key crops, like sweet potatoes and Christmas trees, are labor-intensive to harvest.
Moore County leads the state in migrant farmworkers, by a wide margin. The county is home to the North Carolina Growers Association, which annually obtains the most H-2A visas and connects workers to farms like Agrarian. Workers can remain in the U.S. uninterrupted for up to three years, though many return to their families in Mexico after the growing season.
The question now is whether H-2A employees will keep returning for less pay.
“I think that this season, workers came without a real understanding of what a momentous change this was,” said Carol Brooke, senior attorney for the North Carolina Justice Center. “And we may see a different impact next year in terms of workers’ willingness to come under these conditions. There’s a lot of discontent, a lot of attempts to negotiate with growers for a higher wage.”
Harrell said the reduced pay in the United States is still superior to what workers can earn in Mexico. And on the housing deduction, he noted constructing worker housing is expensive. As a counter, Brooke argued having H-2A workers live together in farm-provided rooms offers tremendous benefits to the farms.
“They pick them up,” she said. “They take them in the fields exactly when they want. Nobody’s arriving late.”
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In December, the N.C. Justice Center cosigned a letter to the Labor Department opposing the Trump administration’s interim wage rule. The policy is being challenged in court, though Republican Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina has introduced a bill to codify the AEWR changes.
The dust is settling on IBM’s historically bad day.
On July 14, the New York tech company (and major Triangle employer) saw its stock crash 25%, a selloff sparked when CEO Arvind Krishna shared that the company’s mainframe division lost more revenue “than our expectations” because customers were instead purchasing “servers, storage and memory” linked to AI buildouts.
On Wednesday, IBM held its first earnings call since this major slide. And analysts shared their thoughts in notes provided to The N&O.
IBM framed its revenue shortfall as an issue of timing, not demand. “Tens of large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected,” chief financial officer James Kavanaugh said. IBM quickly recovered about a third of these “slipped mainframe deals,” the investment firm Jefferies wrote in an analysis that backed the “timing, not demand” view.
“Feeling Blue, For Now,” is how Jefferies titled its note, having fun with IBM’s “Big Blue” nickname.
But is there a longer-term threat? “More questions than answers,” UBS analyst David Vogt wrote. “Expect the stock to trade sideways.” IBM’s decision to cut its software forecast, Vogt argued, raised concerns about how artificial intelligence is affecting the broader company.
And Morgan Stanley analysts said IBM has “little room for error” if it wants to hit its revenue goals for the second half of 2026.
One area that shouldn’t worry Big Blue is the Raleigh open source software provider Red Hat, which IBM acquired in 2019. In a turbulent quarter, Red Hat again delivered double-digit revenue growth. Vogt called it a “bright spot.”
American Efficient entered bankruptcy last weekend. This Durham energy firm, with ties to a state senator, faces a $1.1 billion federal fraud penalty. Yet in its Chapter 11 filing, the company reported having no more than $10 million in assets. It also said it owes North Carolina $105,122 in taxes.
The chasm between the federal penalty and the company’s stated assets may seem to make any plan to pay creditors moot. But here’s further context I didn’t have in my initial story this week: American Efficient’s $1 million to $10 million asset estimate does not cover its affiliated companies, said Kevin Chen, an accounting professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
In a separate July 18 bankruptcy filing, American Efficient affiliate Affirmed Energy listed between $100 million and $500 million in assets, with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s penalty by far its largest liability. “If that (FERC) order is upheld, the government may pursue those companies directly,” Chen told me.
American Efficient has denied wrongdoing, arguing it followed the energy policy rules in place at the time. It is continuing to fight the unanimous ruling from the bipartisan FERC board in court.
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This story was originally published July 24, 2026 at 9:18 AM with the headline “NC migrant farmworkers saw their pay plunge this season. Will they come back?.”
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