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!