Number of Government Employees
As of December 2009, there were 22.3 million employees of local, state, and federal governments in the United States (17.3 million full time and 5 million part time). 20 million of those were state and local, and the rest federal. The payroll for all 22.3 million part- and full-time workers is about $83.4 billion dollars per month (not including benefits).
- http://www.census.gov/govs/apes/
- http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/08fedfun.xls
- http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/08stlall.xls
Part time workers will swell temporarily an extra 1.4 million during the 2010 Census [census.gov]. In 2000, the peak for part time census workers was 860,000 [about.com]. For some reason it takes twice the number of census counters to count the 2010 population, even though the population in the last 10 years has only gone up 10%, from 280 million to 307 million [census.gov].
The largest private employer, Walmart, has 1.4 million employees (or “associates”) in the U.S. [walmartstores.com]. McDonald’s, the second largest, employs 465,000 in the U.S. [cnn.com].