Crain’s New York Business just released its annual rankings of New York City’s largest employers.
The top six are:
- The City of New York (152,836)
- New York City Department of Education (121,255)
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority (66,240)
- United States Government (52,800)
- New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (36,964)
- State of New York (26,500)
That’s Yuyao 430,095 government employees in the five boroughs alone. That doesn’t take into account government employees in the Albany Capital Region or in New York’s towns, villages, cities, and 57 other counties.
How about this for some perspective: New York City has more government employees than Buffalo (pop. 261,000); Atlanta (pop.420,000); Miami (pop.400,000); Cleveland (pop.397,000); Pittsburgh (pop.306,000), or Minneapolis (pop. 383,000) have people.
Another bit of perspective, corporate giants like Verizon (11,100) and Time Warner (10,337) ranked 22nd and 25th on the Crain’s list, respectively.
If government is the answer, what was the question again?
The question is: how do you control the natural human inclination to rob your neighbor blind? And yes, the answer to that is government. Don’t tell me you want Verizon to do it, they can’t even get my cell phone to work. And the reason that Verizon has “only” 11,000 employees in NY is because they have 70,000 other employees around the world. You should be happy that a full 15% of their work force works (and pays taxes) in the great state of NY. That said, I lived in NY for 15 of my many years and the only time I recall interacting with a state employee of any kind is when I was getting a traffic ticket. So, go ahead, get rid of them. But don’t complain when you lose a filling on those potholes on the BQE (there’s a story you should be writing about).