The area’s biggest employers? Mostly not energy companies
THE energy industry may dominate the Houston economy, but the region’s biggest employers aren’t energy companies. Instead, they’re the grocery stores, health care providers and retailers that cater to the surge of new residents who come to work in energy, at oil and gas companies, oil-related manufacturers and professional service firms, such as law and accounting practices.
The biggest employer in Houston is Walmart, which has 34,000 employees in the local area, followed by San Antoniobased H-E-B with nearly 27,000 local employees and Memorial Hermann Health System with 26,000. Houston’s biggest restaurant chain is McDonald’s, with its 16,000member local workforce, coming in at No. 7 on the list of Houston’s biggest companies.
Those companies and others followed the population shifts to suburban areas as white-collar energy jobs expanded in the West Houston energy corridor and blue-collar jobs sprung up on the east side as the petrochemical industry boomed. Houston added 36,000 homes a year for each of the past three years in the metro area and about 28,000 are in the distant suburbs, said Bill Gilmer, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.
That growth has drawn supermarkets and shopping centers, especially around the Grand Parkway, as well as hospitals such as Houston Methodist, Memorial Hermann, the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center and Texas Children’s Hospital and associated clinics and doctors.
“They’re chasing rooftops,” Gilmer said.
Professional and business services is one of the region’s biggest and fastest-growing employment sectors, according to the Labor Department. Over the past year, professional and business services grew more that 6 percent, bringing the number of jobs in the sector to more than 500,000 in April. The education and health services sector employs close to 400,000 and retail more than 300,000.
In comparison, oil and gas extraction companies and energy services providers employed about 78,000 in April. Manufacturing, which is closely tied to the oil and gas industry here, employed nearly 230,000 in April, after adding about 10,000 jobs over the year.
Services companies tend to be bigger employers because their businesses are not as easy to automate as say, manufacturing, which increasingly uses robots. Retailers still need checkers and stockers, restaurants still need chefs and servers, and hospitals still need doctors and nurses.
Only one energy company, Exxon Mobil Corp., which consolidated its local operations near The Woodlands in 2014, cracked the list of the top 10 biggest employers in the Houston area, ranking at No. 10, according to the Houston Chronicle’s annual survey. Exxon Mobil, headquartered in Irving, has more than 10,000 employees at its 385-acre Houston-area campus as it relocates some 1,200 positions from its shale drilling subsidiary, XTO Energy, from Fort Worth. Another 400 jobs could follow in 2020.
That signals Exxon Mobil’s presence in the Houston area is only likely to grow, said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership
"It’s a sign that Exxon Mobil believes it’s more efficient to operate an energy company in Houston than any other location," he said.
Exxon Mobil’s growth suggests a second energy corridor could grow north of Houston, attracting manufacturers, suppliers and a host of other businesses to provide goods and services to energy companies and their employees.
It’s already led to an expansion of medical facilities. Houston Methodist, No. 4 on the list of Houston’s biggest employers, opened the doors of its newest hospital in The Woodlands in July, already expanding in March with a second medical office building.