Amazon just announced that it would add more than 100,000 fulltime jobs in the US over the next 18 months. That’s fantastic.
But even before that announcement, it turns out that Amazon was the fastest US company to reach 300,000 jobs. That’s based on a new paper we are releasing today, called “A Historical Perspective on Tech Job Growth.” Here’s the beginning of the paper.
General Motors reached 300,000 employees in 1941, 32 years after its 1909 founding. American Telephone & Telegraph hit the same milestone in 1926, 27 years after its 1899 absorption of the local Bell systems. And Walmart went over 300,000 associates in its 1991 fiscal year, its 21st year as a public company.
But in 2016, Amazon became the fastest American company to reach 300,000 workers, hitting that mark in its 20th year as a public company. This figure, which does not include contractors or temporary workers, represents an average employment growth rate of roughly 30% per year. That’s an amazing growth rate.
But Amazon is not alone. In fact, tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are adding jobs as fast or faster than the great job-producing companies of the past, like GM, AT&T, Walmart, IBM, GE, US Steel, and Bethlehem Steel.
Consider this: Twenty years after its 1892 founding, General Electric had 41,000 employees. Google beat that mark in 2012, only 8 years after its 2004 initial public offering.
Read the paper here.
