For the first time, the nonprofit world’s work force is larger than the work force of the manufacturing industry, according to an analysis of the latest-available employment data by Johns Hopkins University researchers.
Nonprofits had an estimated 12,488,563 workers on their payrolls in 2017, slightly more than manufacturing companies, which employed 12,456,203 workers. That’s a difference of 32,360 people, or roughly the capacity of Southern Methodist University’s football stadium.
Though that might seem small compared with the size of the entire work force, “this is just a mind-blowing discovery,” said Lester Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society.
The data in the study includes all workers — full-time, part-time, and contractors.
Nonprofit workers now account for about 10.2 percent of the national work force, exceeding other industries such as construction (7.1 million) and finance and insurance (5.9 million). Hotels, restaurants, and other entities that involve providing lodging or food services have a larger labor pool than nonprofits, at 13.7 million workers, and employees at retail stores number 15.9 million.
The nonprofit world’s overtaking of manufacturing is partly the result of a slow-growing manufacturing industry. But it also shows the strength of the nonprofit world, which has been growing faster than the for-profit work force for several years.
Across the broader landscape, from 2016 to 2017, the number of nonprofit workers increased by almost 2 percent, while the number of employees in the business world increased by 1.5 percent.
The analysis, released last week, a preview of a more comprehensive annual report to be released in January 2020 from the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Economic Data Project, also highlighted data on the urbanization of the nonprofit work force.
New data from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics allowed the researchers to study the distribution of nonprofit workers by metropolitan area. They found that the conventional hypothesis that nonprofit employment is mostly found in metropolitan areas to be more nuanced than previously thought.
They found nearly half of all U.S. metropolitan areas — typically smaller cities — have smaller shares of nonprofit employment than the national average of 10.2 percent for nonprofit employment.
In smaller metropolitan areas, nonprofit workers account for about 7 percent of the work force. In rural areas, they account for 8.7 percent.
“In other words, there are fewer nonprofit workers in some of those metro areas,” said Salamon. “And it turns out that the rural areas have higher nonprofit shares of employment than do the smaller urban or metropolitan areas.”
Michael Theis writes about data and accountability for the Chronicle, conducting surveys and reporting on fundraising, giving, salaries, taxes, and more. He recently surveyed pay packages at charities and found wide disparities in base salaries and bonuses among nonprofit causes. Email Michael or follow him on Twitter. Jimena Faz Garza is a former editorial intern.
