Big, small add staff, but banks, others keep on downsizing

By Jerry Ackerman, Globe Staff

Top 50 Employers

ome of Massachusetts' biggest employers got a little bigger last year - among them, Fidelity Investments, Gillette Co., and the phone company, now Bell Atlantic.

And more smaller companies got bigger, according to the Globe 100's survey of employment in the Bay State.

All of which helps explain how employment in Massachusetts, according to state statistics, hit 3,149,000 in February - its highest level since 1988.

Not to say that downsizing has been given a pink slip since the recession that set in during 1990 lifted in 1994-95.

Employment by big banks is mostly down. Polaroid Corp. shed 1,200 Massachusetts jobs as it phased out camera manufacturing in Norwood last year. TJX Cos. reported 1,850 fewer employees in the state for this year's survey.

But Bell Atlantic added employees to meet demands placed on it by competition in telecommunications, which requires more phone lines and more customer service.

And Fidelity Investments reported a sizable jump, helping to push the total number of jobs at Massachusetts' top 10 employers to 115,231, up from 109,719 in last year's survey.

By comparison, the top 10 employers in 1988, the first year surveyed for the Globe 100, counted nearly 55 percent more jobs - 178,135 in all - than this year's figure.

The top employer that year was Digital, with 33,750 jobs in the state, three times as many as today. Raytheon was second at 30,813, double its current employment, and Nynex was third at 24,500. Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. reported 19,000 employees and General Electric Co. 18,000. Economists looking at the most recent total employment numbers still marvel at how long the boom has lasted, but see new warning signs that it can't last forever.

One such sign is that persistent shortages of qualified employees are spreading from engineering and computer sciences to other fields, said Fred Breimyer, chief economist at State Street Bank. If companies can't find help locally, they may consider moving. Also, many of the state's newest jobs have come about with the creation of enterprises. But some lenders are wondering whether they have been too free with credit in helping these start-ups start up.

Also, most of the recent job growth has been around Boston. ''The Massachusetts story is really an Eastern Massachusetts story, not a Western Massachusetts one,'' Breimyer said.

Nor has the boom reached Connecticut and Maine, as it did in the 1980s.

Still, the state Division of Employment and Training says the 90,200 total new jobs added in the Bay State during the past year - a 2.9 percent growth rate - were in every business sector, from high tech to manufacturing to government.

Companies reporting gains over last year's survey include Cambridge-based Genzyme Corp., whose 2,600-person payroll is up 62 percent and Reebok International Ltd., which, despite sagging sales, reported 2,011 employees in Massachusetts, a 60 percent increase.

Gillette, meanwhile, added 212 employees in Massachusetts, coming in this year at 4,750, but stayed in 18th place in the ranking.

Mutual funds have delivered on their promises, made as they were seeking tax concessions, to hire more people.

Fidelity reported 11,724 employees in Massachusetts for this year's survey, an increase of 786. Putnam Investments is up to 5,200 people employed in its home state, a gain of 700.

Globe 100 rankings of the state's top 50 employers for the past two years have been muddied somewhat as Stop & Shop changed the way it reports its figures.

With large numbers of part-time employees, most supermarket companies report jobs in terms of full-time equivalents. Stop & Shop has been an exception, usually adding all its employees together, saying it is unable to give full-time equivalents.

For last year's survey, it did report full-time equivalents, at 5,101. But this year, Stop & Shop reverted to its old ways and declared 16,340 total employees.

The result: The company jumped from 16th place in the 1997 Globe 100 rankings to second place in this year's, displacing every other company below it.