Employment in Facility Services: the E.U. and the U.S.

Abstract

There is a need of current reports on the Facility Service (FS) industry. The FS industry is not represented as a whole in the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE) or the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NACE and NAICS are used as basis for most public reports. Therefore, the current size of the FS sector is unclear. The research questions are: How large is the size of the FS sector in terms of employment in the US? What is the difference between the US and the EU regarding the FS sector in terms of employment? The European Norm EN 15221-4 lists all Facility services in detail. This list is compared to NACE, as Eurostat provides data on employment based on NACE. So, the relevant Facility Services are selected and the number of employees in FS is estimated. To transfer the study to the US, FS are selected from NAICS as the United States Census Bureau publishes data on employment based on NAICS. This is used to assess the number of employees in FS in the US. The numbers are set in relation to the business economy. Results show that in the EU in 2019 more than 14 million employees work in the FS sector. In the US there are more than 9 million. In the EU, this is almost 11% of all employees in the business economy, in the US this is more than 9%. The FS sector is a growing sector in the US and the EU. In the EU it is rather stable during and after a crisis, like the financial crises of 2008/09. There are deviations in the EU compared to the previous years because the UK left the EU, and is no longer included in EU statistics.