The Post-Employee Economy
Derek Thompson has a post up on the ‘post-employee economy’ that ties in to a lot of what I’ve been writing about in regards to the service class replacing the middle class. He writes:
Fifty years ago, the four most valuable U.S. companies employed an average of 430,000 people with an average market cap of $180 billion. This year, the four largest U.S. companies employ an average 120,000 people with an average market cap of $334 billion. The titans of 2011 have twice the the value of their 1964 counterparts with a quarter of the employees.
This might help us understand why even with a mild economic recovery underway, unemployment remains so high.
He points out that he has excluded one particularly powerful corporation from the top-ten list: Walmart:
You might notice the last chart has only nine companies. That’s because I’ve excluded Walmart, whose chart-busting 2.1 million employees is the equal of the top six companies (Exxon,
