Hacker News Reader

Comment by JacobDotVI | Hacker News Reader

Now do it for:

* US DoD * Walmart * McDonalds * USPS

Walmart, which has a presence in communities of all shapes and sizes, is the largest private employer in the nation with 1.5 million workers. Yet the number of Americans who rely on the corporate giant for their livelihoods is dwarfed by the number who rely on the federal government for their paychecks. The federal government employs nearly 9.1 million workers, comprising nearly 6 percent of total employment in the United States. The figure includes nearly 2.1 million federal employees, 4.1 million contract employees, 1.2 million grant employees, 1.3 million active duty military personnel, and more than 500,000 postal service employees.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/438242-the-federal-gover...

State and local is even bigger. Id guess 600k employees of New York state/county/city/town/authority payrolls.

Mass employment businesses aren’t common. I visited a gold ball factory once… there were about 3 people packing boxes and one dude fiddling with the machines.

I was going to say, I've looked at local statistics before for my area and found out the city and local municipalities have a ton of employees. Typically the biggest employer in your city is going to be your city, possibly your county.

Is "gold ball" some kind of industry term or classification of a factory? Or are they literally producing spheres of gold?

EDIT: oooh, you probably meant "golf ball". I was not being purposely difficult, just dumb

I apologize I intended golf ball!

I would imagine that internal controls would require more employees of a factory making balls from gold! :)

When you consider "part time + another job" vs full time employment the "who is solely dependent on what for their livelihood" comparison probably tips even further toward the federal government.

And those aren't the only checks people get from the government.

> While it's possible that more people work at a McDonald's than either Amazon or Walmart — the fast-food brand estimates more than 2 million globally — the company primarily operates on a franchise model, so it directly employs less than 50,000 in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com