Unexpectedly Intriguing!
13 January 2006

We here at Political Calculations were wondering recently just who the biggest employers are in the U.S. among the Fortune 500 publicly-traded companies. The following list is what we were able to mine from Fortune's most recent annual listing, which presents data for 2004 (and also provides the rank in the table below):

Top 10 U.S. Employers
Rank Company Revenue ($ millions USD) Employees
1 Wal-Mart Stores 288,189.00 1,600,000
116 McDonald's 19,064.70 438,000
42 United Parcel Service 36,582.00 384,000
332 Interpublic Group 6,077.40 329,001
13 Home Depot 73,094.00 325,000
4 Ford Motor 172,233.00 324,864
3 General Motors 193,517.00 324,000
5 General Electric 152,363.00 307,000
27 Target 49,934.00 300,000
8 Citigroup 108,276.00 290,500

Collectively, these ten companies account for the gainful employment of some 4,622,365 people. Going by the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonally-adjusted total civilian labor force for December 2004 of 148,173,000, the employees of these 10 companies account for 3.1% of the entire civil workforce in the U.S.

More impressively, these 10 companies raked in $1,099,330,100,000 USD (that's $1.1 trillion US dollars) in 2004. That rounds up to 9.4% of the U.S. 2004 GDP and, if these 10 companies were their own country, would place them ahead of Canada (with a GDP-PPP of $1.023 trillion USD) and behind Russia (with at GDP-PPP of $1.408 trillion USD) in the world economic production rankings!

About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

ironman at politicalcalculations

Thanks in advance!

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