A Little Bleg
I mentioned The Wealth of Networks a few days ago and have been reading it since -- tons of thought-provoking stuff. One of the main themes that goes through the book is grounded in the simple observation that people do plenty of stuff other than work for financial gain. Some people play golf, others start blogs, some play poker, some write open-source software, some are in fantasy baseball leagues, whatever. A related point is that lots of stuff gets done by organizations that aren't for-profit companies -- you've got universities, foundations, The American Prospect, labor unions, fantasy baseball leagues, what have you. This raised a tangentially related question in my mind -- how many people actually do work in the for-profit sector? I couldn't quite figure it out with some quick web searching, but here's what I came up with.
For one thing, even though work looms large for those of us who have full-time jobs, not that many people are really doing it. The March 2006 Current Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 143.6 million Americans have jobs. That's a lot of people. But 298.4 million people live in this country, meaning that fewer than half work at all. And about 23 million working people are working part time (4 million of them due to bad labor market conditions, 19 million because they don't want full time work).
That, however, only starts us down the road to an answer. I think that all told the federal government employees about 4 million people when you count the soldiers. But how many people work for state and local governments? For non-profits? I have no idea. Perhaps the distributed intelligence of the internet can help me out.
Matt
for government employment, and, non-profit employment, respectively, check out these cites.
punchline: state and local combine for about 14% of total employment, with non-profit (less precisely measured) about 8% of private employment (so, about 7% of total employment).
hope it helps.
http://www.bls.gov/iag/government.htm
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/09/art3full.pdf
April 19, 2006 8:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't forget to trim out all the people who are too young or old to be expected to work, even if a certain number of them do.
April 19, 2006 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hospitals and health care are kind of odd beasts in this analysis, though.
For example, it's not clear to me the meaningful difference between a not-for-profit hospital and a for-profit hospital is in this context. I mean, a Tenet hospital and a not-for-profit hospital do almost exactly the same thing, the only difference being that the Tenet hospital sends a check to stockholders at the end of the day.
Anyway, it's not clear to me why an analysis of "what the nonprofits contribute" would put New York's hospitals on one side of the ledger and, say, Illinois' on the other.
April 19, 2006 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
These statistics scare me, 154.8 million unemployed people, this is huge... How can we expect things to work when we face such numbers. We need some changes on the labor market, I hope the government will wake up in time.
Arizona Payroll Services
November 28, 2007 3:35 AM | Reply | Permalink