by Alec Muffett
After two armies, McDonalds and Walmart:
BBC News – Which is the world’s biggest employer?.
Now look at the countries sized per-capita represented by those organisations:
Spot the odd one out; Britain is the #22 country by population, with the 5th biggest employer.
I believe the 1.3 million is the NHS in England, excluding Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Although the English population dominates the UK, so we probably only drop below Italy in size with that correction (60M to 50M).
On the other hand when measuring employees we should perhaps order countries by potential workforce, when the UK is substantially further up the list of countries by workforce (~18), presumably because less developed countries have younger populations on average.
Certainly the NHS is unusual as an organization, but I guess the question should be does it work. It produces worse outcomes than French health care, but better than America, and is substantially cheaper per capita than either of them. So I suspect the answer is that currently the NHS is comparable to the best performing health care systems in the world, but the results are worse simply because less money is spent on healthcare in the UK than France.
That said my recent experience have been pretty poor, and I’m sure there is a lot of room for improvement.
For comparison, the United States healthcare sector employs about 14.3 million in total across all its disparate separate businesses.
UK govt doc claiming German healthcare industry employs 4.9 million in total.
http://www.abhi.org.uk/multimedia/e-newswire/issue71/healthcare_germany_report_abhi_may_2009_doc.pdf
The UK only stands out cause most of our healthcare sector is part of one monolithic organisation.
Quite. People who are pro-competition might call that a bit unfair.
But I didn’t work for “the computer industry” instead I worked for Sun Microsystems.
Are you employed by an industry?
McDonald’s appearing there startles me a bit: I thought most of their restaurants were franchises and most of their manufacture was subcontracted. If they’re including employees of franchisees, that’s very much not like-for-like with other organisations in that league table.
On the other point, yes, McDonald’s is clearly a multinational employer. So too is Walmart: I bet that figure includes all ASDA employees, for example.
Good point… oh, but WalMart sold Asda in 2009
Walmart sold ASDA to Corinth Services Limited, but Corinth is itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walmart. More an artefact of their balanced-tree implementation than an actual sale. (-8
The statistic which always stuck in my mind is that the NHS is the largest single employer in Western Europe. It seems that’s still the case.
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