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Who employs the high-ho high-ho highest?

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Large firms like Amazon and Starbucks facing calls from employees for better working conditions among threats of unionisation. It begs the question though, how many people do they actually employ?

Amazon is the 2nd largest publicly-listed employer globally with 1.27m employees, only behind another American giant, Walmart, on 2.2m

McDonald’s is also among these two (latest estimates from 2015 are between 1.7m-1.9m) although this includes a large proportion who are part of one of their franchise stores.

US logistics and retail firms are among the other top global employers with FedEx (4th, 570k), UPS (7th, 540k), Kroger and Home Depot (9th and 10th, 500k)

Amazon is the 2nd largest publicly-listed employer globally with 1.27m employees, only behind another American giant, Walmart, on 2.2m

And outside of the US, Germany’s Volkswagen has a workforce of over 660k people and the largest British private sector employer is Compass Group, a catering business that employs almost 550k staff

This is nothing, though, compared to some of the world’s largest government-funded employers

The largest public-sector employers tend to be armed forces:

• The US military is the world’s largest employer including 2.9m service members and civilians
• Next largest is China’s People’s Liberation Army with 2.3m (according to latest estimates) and then Russia’s armed forces on 1.9m
• India (1.3m-1.4m) and South Korea (1.2m) come 4th and 5th, respectively

Following this are number of government departments:

• China has a number of very large government employers, including China Railway (2m employees) the Ministry of Public Security (1.9m which covers policing, law enforcement and intelligence), China National Petroleum Corporation (1.6m) and the State Grid of China (1.5m)
• The UK’s National Health Service is the next largest with 1.7m employees. While this isn’t the largest in absolute terms, this is the largest relative to the size of the country (2.5% of the UK’s population)
• India’s Railways, often quoted as the world’s largest employer, has 1.4m staff members - one of the largest in India, but not quite the largest globally

Note: all employment stats are estimates and are dependent on when they were reported. Some stats included in this article were reported back to 2015. Stats do not necessarily include contractors and franchises unless otherwise stated

Source: Companies Market Cap; We Forum; Statistica McDonalds; US Defence; Forbes; World Atlas;