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%
We currently have a labor force of ~160 million people and Walmart employs "1 out of every 72 American workers" or ~1.3%
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_De...
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-..., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.