5 ms·
I wonder what the largest private employers as % of total labor force have been throughout history. We currently have a labor force of ~160 million people and
by runnerup 5y ago
I wonder what the largest private employers as % of total labor force have been throughout history.
We currently have a labor force of ~160 million people and Walmart employs "1 out of every 72 American workers" or ~1.3%
- flohofwoe 5y agoProbably the East India Company. It controlled "half of the world's trade", had 50k employes, its own navy and army with a quarter million soldiers (although most of those recruited from local populations). All the while England's and Wales' population was 5 million people at the start of the 18th century.
- phreeza 5y agoWasn't basically everyone an employee of one "company" in communist countries?
- gurleen_s 5y agoNo, most “communist” countries (and I use the term loosely because really they were just state capitalist) owned many different companies, rather than being part of one mega government corporation.
- handmodel 5y agoIts all a spectrum but I think in practice the above statement is meaningful. In the USSR the government set ranges of wages that different firms/administrators could give out. I guess in practice you had some choice but not if you had one entity with practically unlimited negotiating power.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThere were political differences, though. At least in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic where I grew up. First of all, there were some collectively owned enterprises (cooperatives), which were a tiny bit more independent than directly state owned business. They could deviate a little from the strict, centrally directed price and wage norms etc. Second, even in the state owned sector, there was some diversity among political attitudes. Some directors were more pragmatic and would be willing to employ even people whose cadre record was tainted (e.g. a relative defected to the West). Some directors were hardcore Communists who would never tolerate suspicious or politically unreliable characters in their workforce. Finding a job if you were deemed politically unreliable was a big deal, because being jobless for a certain period of time was a crime punishable by prison. (Parasitism.)
- 8note 5y agoLetting people be homeless is a grand success in western countries, by comparison
- m4rtink 5y agoActually there was IMHO another class of directors in CSSR than idealists/hardliners and pragmatists - the totally corrupt ones. :P Those knew how to play the system and how to get ridd of the others while being untouchable due to being representatives of the regime.
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- cortesoft 5y agoIsn’t that like treating the divisions of a company separate?
- allemagne 5y agoI'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as "communist" countries are in fact, Marxist-Leninist, or as I've recently taken to calling them, "state capitalist"
- baybal2 5y agoIt varied wildly as communist countries tried every trick on the table to keep their economies from dying every few years, but the essence was that none of them really worked before most minimal forms of private property, and enterprise was allowed.
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- SavantIdiot 5y agoIt depends on which country, there were multiple attempts, there is no "one" communism, but generally "NO". The USSR after the revolution was literally called the Soviet Union. A "soviet" is a council elected by workers. Basically workers would own the means of production through soviets, and they would join together as a larger governing body. Unfortunately, the autocrats and populists took control and killed everyone; or as in Russia, illness also helped kill the vast majority of able-bodied people which really screwed their production. But I'm WAY oversimplifying.
- ingas 5y agoIt seems NO. In Soviet Union considerable part was in cooperation. And more in Stalin era then later. Citing Russian wikipedia: > By the end of the 1950s, there were more than 114 thousand workshops and other industrial enterprises in its system, where 1.8 million people worked. They produced 5.9 % of the gross industrial output, for example, up to 40 % of all furniture, up to 70 % of all metal utensils, more than a third of upper knitwear, almost all children's toys. The system of commercial cooperation included 100 design bureaus, 22 experimental laboratories and two research institutes. China is capitalism all the way now. IDK about North Korea but they don't seems like a "communist country" for me.
- austincheney 5y agoI don't know about private. But the largest employer in the world is the US Department of Defense employing an estimated 2.8 million people which is about triple what Amazon employs. WalMart has about 2.2 million world wide of which 1.5 million are US employees. Amazon, according to the article, has about 950,000 employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
- rossmmurray 5y agoThe UK's National Health Service (NHS) is definitely up there. There are 1.6m people working for NHS and about 41m people of working age in the UK. So that's about 1 in 26 (or 3.9%). Sources: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-workforce https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-..., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S