Talk:List of largest employers

Untitled
I felt this was an important list to add - a company's impact is felt way beyond its revenues. In the global marketplace, a company like #7 Agricultural Bank of China was #377 in revenues, but employed nearly half a million people. In parts of the world where employees and customers alike have less money than in the US, we wouldn't be comparing apples to apples. That being said, none of this is original research. Obviously this imformation has been available. It just hasn't been shown in Wikipedia this way before. I do have the entire list of 500 in Excel, which I hate to throw away. It's a useful tool for anyone creating 2005 or 2007 lists. Is there any way to save that? I keyed in the employment numbers from the Fortune website and I'd hate to do that again. Also, considering that #486 on the Fortune list had 332,000 employees, I would almost guarantee that there are many other companies with over 200,000. I wasn't ready to spend the time researching through the Fortune Global 2000 for them, however. I hope anyone familiar with those companies can add them with proper documentation. Should I mark the 61 companies I added with an "F" or something to mark where they came from? I don't want to clutter the screen with external hyperlinks for each line. SSherris 00:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if this content is useful, I sorted the list in revenue/employee and profit/employee. It seems like a freaky examination. But the results could be interesting. For example, Toyota motors is first and MacDonalds is last concerning revenue per employee. CityGroup is first concerning profit per employee. The other figures might not all be very relevant or interesting, I just thought I would copy this here. --Rougieux (talk) 17:13, 6 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree that it's an important list. But the money cnn webpage already provides such lists. Mehfoos (talk) 09:49, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Someone's trying to deliberately tamper with the info
I checked the BBC source and found that the list is accurate save for the Indian organisations. Someone conveniently added a million or so to the workforce to make it go up the rankings here. I also saw that the Fortune 500 listing is inaccurate. If someone could go through the source to rectify it, it would be great. Mehfoos (talk) 09:49, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

This is still the case! Nov 11 201286.136.165.111 (talk) 18:11, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Indian Railways?
I thought Indian Railways is the largest employer in the world. It says so on the Wikipedia Article and several other sites and Guinness World books of Records. (1.5 million employees) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.99.99.53 (talk) 14:52, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the reasoning is the belief at it is not a "company," but instead a branch of the Indian government. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:21, 15 January 2009 (UTC)


 * It's a myth. BBC and several other sources have busted it. Wikipedia cannot be trusted so much. On this very page, someone's been trying to tamper the info. Mehfoos (talk) 09:45, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Catholic Church
According to the article Catholic Church, that church has 1,402,989 "personnel". In terms of numbers, that puts it in 4th place on the list.

CBHA (talk) 17:47, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

More than one million only in the US, where it is far from being the majority religion. If we add all the millions in service in Europe and Southern America, It might be the largest organisation in the world. --176.62.41.204 (talk) 11:52, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Updating
I think it is a mistake to fix the list to the end of 2007, in some years it will be totally irrelevant. Either the title should be changed to "List of companies by employees 2007" and a new article should be created for each year or the article should be updated to the latest known numbers, maybe with sections on historical numbers.82.209.156.151 (talk) 12:03, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

NHS
The National Health Service would not appear on the Revenue lists, however they employ a huge amount of personnel. the NHS employ around 1.5 million people so should be on the list —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.105.174.33 (talk) 17:24, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

Foxconn
Foxconn has 920,000 employees. Also think, this list should be renamed "List of companies by employees 2007". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.35.103.95 (talk) 14:29, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Foxconn wikipedia page now claims 4.3 million employees as of their 2014/15 annual report. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.115.216.44 (talk) 22:04, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Aramark
US food services company Aramark has 255,000 employees so should be included towards the end of the list as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.149.31.232 (talk) 01:14, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Accenture
Has 624,000 employees accoring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.216.90.104 (talk) 09:40, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Temp Agencies
On John Gibson's radio show today, he said the two largest employers were Walmart and a temp agency. I was wondering which one he was referring to but didn't see it listed.65.36.99.94 (talk) 06:18, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Kelly ServicesRobinrobin (talk) 06:28, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Manpower Inc had about 30 000 internal staff and 4 000 000 external in 2008/2009. Hellsop (talk) 15:40, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

US and China's comparison
When I was checking the "United States Department of Defense" employees, it took into account the reserved. Meanwhile, when I checked the "People's Liberation Army", it only took into account the active personnel. This would be unfair for the statistic. The reserve personnel should be taken into account for the "People's Liberation Army" as well, since it was also applied to the "United States Department of Defense" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.106.40.162 (talk) 19:18, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

What he said dougmc (talk) 23:35, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

US DoD number?
According to the US Office of Personnel Management, the US had 1.583 million uniformed military personnel in 2011.

The US also had 2.820 million civilian employees- including all the government programs, employees, regulators, courts, legislative staff, and even the post office, etc.

The President's letter of October 1, 2013 about the government shutdown (when even contractors weren't allowed to work on government contracts) says "more than 2 million civilian workers and 1.4 million active duty military."

3.2M in just the DoD seems high.

Sources:

http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/

http://www.usda.gov/POTUS-letter.pdf

US lists: Off topic?
I don't understand why the two US lists, interesting as they, are are on this page. Unless we do similar for the other 192 countries in the world, shouldn't these be on their own page or to a page on US Economy or US Labour? The second list is actually lists of employee per industry which also is not quite what the page is about.

Definitely useful to link to these though for comparison. Athosfolk (talk) 12:09, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

U.S. Postal Service in list of private companies?
Why is the U.S. Postal Service, a U.S. government agency, listed in the list of top 10 "private" companies? The list description says that government-owned corporations are not included. --EngineeringGuy (talk) 13:16, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Sinopec in list of private companies?
Why is Sinopec under the list of largest non-government employers? It's a state-owned corporation, much like PetroChina (which is excluded from this list). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.93.49.21 (talk) 20:25, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

McDonald's does not employ 1.9 million
The McDonald's Corporation employs 440,000 people, according to their regulatory filing and reputable secondary sources. Franchises licensing the McDonald's name possibly employ over a million additional employees, but those aren't employed by McDonald's. The BBC and other news aggregators seem to have been confused by the company's quote of "1.9 million", which even when counting franchises seems overinflated. With 35,000 restaurants, this works out to 54 employees per restaurant, and still leaves 10,000 employees for headquarters. I suspect they include in that count independent cattle growers and other suppliers who work solely or primarily with McDonald's.

This is a lot like BP's TV ads, claiming they "provide work for almost a quarter million Americans", when in fact, fewer than 50,000 of those are actually U.S. BP employees.

When discussing the world's largest employers, it is important to distinguish between those affiliated with an employer, and those actually being employed by it. Owen&times; &#9742;  01:51, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * McDonald's essentially IS a franchise, so counting the franchise employees does make sense to me. Actually, both sources explicitly state that franchise employees are included, I will put that in a footnote. Also, I don't see how a sparse Yahoo data entry is a more "reputable source" than full BBC and The Economist articles. Also, Forbes in its latest statistic on the matter does include McDonald's as well. So the BBC, Forbes, and The Economist all got it wrong? It is possible, but it certainly is not likely. I think more solid sources on your claim would be needed, like maybe an article on how McDonald's is manipulating its employee count? Otherwise, I would have to discount your claim as original research. -- Theoprakt (talk) 21:15, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Plagiarism or Stasis?
I just wanted to include 2015 data, and found a list by the World Economic Forum's Henry Taylor, published on June 17, 2015:. It was subsequently quoted by Forbes, by Business Insider and probably others. What makes me suspicious is that these are the exact same organizations and the exact same numbers that have been on Wikpedia for 2012 for several years now, which in turn are quoted from the BBCs. Given that between 2010 and 2012 there seems to have be a noticable change at least in the order of hunderd thousand employees, for almost all listed organizations, I wonder if we have fallen into some sort of economical stasis, or is there some serious plagiarism going on? -- Theoprakt (talk) 22:35, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Amazon Update
Amazon has been going nuts lately, bumping them up a few spots - https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-tops-750000-employees-first-time-adding-nearly-100000-people-three-months/ Care to update the stats a bit? Thanks! 2601:444:C302:2E09:C910:FFF3:E286:3A14 (talk) 20:55, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
 * As soon as Forbes updates their data, from which the entire list is sourced, we can update the article. Or another source that gives a list based on newer data could be used. Changing the ranking of a single company, even if a new number is sourced, would be "original research" in regard to the relationship with the other companies, because there is no source that verifies the overall order of the new list. See WP:SYNTHESIS. --IamNotU (talk) 14:44, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Tata Group
I have reverted this edit:, which added the Tata Group to the second list. Fortune doesn't consider the Tata Group holding company to be one single company, but lists the independently-operated companies separately in the "Global 500", on which this table is based. The largest in the Global 500, Tata Motors, has only 81,000 employees. Please don't add Tata Group to the list, since that contradicts the Fortune article that is cited as the source of the list and of the relative rankings of the companies. Adding it, even if there was a reliable source for the total number of employees of the entire group, would result in an overall list and ranking that is not verified in a published source, see WP:SYNTH. --IamNotU (talk) 03:35, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

National health service in twice?
How come the list has both the UK National Health Service and the National Health Service (England) ? Isn't the National Health Service (England) part of the UK National Health Service?

(the above is an unsigned comment from someone else) According to the wiki page National Health Service there is no UK NHS: there's NHS England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales and "Health and Social Care" in Northern Ireland. So really the UK NHS entry should be removed, I think? Steffens123 (talk) 02:06, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Remove Defence Departments from the List or update with correct numbers
Should be removed until proper numbers are implemented. - IE: Indias number includes active, reserve and civilian personell, China includes only active militray personal but no civilian, and US included active and civilian but not reserve personell. And North Korean numbers can not be indipendently verified. The numbers should be constant accross all oragnisations. 195.226.186.10 (talk) 10:40, 17 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. I've adjusted your edit (the phrase you put in the lead was grammatically wrong), but otherwise your explanation is sufficient. Liliana UwU  (talk / contributions) 10:43, 17 February 2023 (UTC)