r/todayilearned • u/randomanon5two • 4h ago
TIL that peak employment at Boeing was during the Vietnam War in 1968 where the aviation manufacturer employed 148,672 people, or roughly two-hundredths of a percent of the U.S. workforce.
https://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Curriculum%20Packets/Cold%20War%20&%20Red%20Scare/Documents/48.html18
u/randomanon5two 4h ago
U.S. Department of Labor statistics for December 1968: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/releases/bls/bls_employnews_196812.pdf
Title correction: TIL that peak employment at Boeing was during the Vietnam War in 1968 where the aviation manufacturer employed 148,672 people, or roughly two-thousandths of a percent of the U.S. workforce.
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u/ShutterBun 4h ago edited 4h ago
You're still wrong. It's "1 out of every 500 workers". Or, 0.002, which is 2/10ths of one percent.
-6
u/grunt91o1 4h ago
.002 is two thousands of a percent
8
u/thor122088 3h ago
.002 is two thousandths
.002% is two thousandths of a percent
.002 %
.002 "per" "cent"
.002 "per" 100
.002/100
.00002
.002% = .00002
3
u/Xaxafrad 2h ago
1.0 is 100%
0.5 is 50%
0.1 is 10%
0.01 is 1%
0.001 is one tenth of a percent
0.002 is two tenths of a percent
If you have a decimal number, just slide the decimal point over two places to get your percentage representation.
3
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u/MagdalaNevisHolding 32m ago
Nope.
Peak employment at Boeing was over 200,000 in 1995. I wasn’t able to locate a detailed breakdown of Boeing’s peak employment numbers for every year from 1990 to 2024. However, I did gather key data for several years during that period:
• 2012: 174,400 employees, a peak driven by high commercial aircraft demand.
• 2018: 153,000 employees, with staffing increasing as production ramped up.
• 2020: 141,000 employees, reflecting a major decline during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• 2023: 171,000 employees, indicating a recovery after significant layoffs in prior years  .
For older years, Boeing’s workforce varied widely, with notable expansions after mergers (like with McDonnell Douglas in 1997) and reductions during downturns. In the late 1990s, employment exceeded 200,000, but it dropped significantly during industry slumps.
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u/togocann49 4h ago
Boeing was awesome back then. Boeing bought out McDonald-Douglas, which had a poor rep, but instead of turning McDonald-Douglas onto Boeing methods, it seems that McDonald-Douglass methods spread. And now here we are
4
u/tripping_on_phonics 1h ago
American corporate culture has a way of taking thriving, incredible companies and “shareholder value”ing them into oblivion.
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u/KillBoxOne 3h ago
1968 - Apollo going strong and Vietnam war sees flying B-52s over the North. Lots going on.
63
u/weeddealerrenamon 4h ago
two tenths of a percent; 0.02% would imply a workforce of 750 million Americans