Top West Michigan Employers

[Yankee Fan]

The Chamber just released its business directory. With a little rounding of numbers here is the basic list of companies and how many they employ. I compared it to the numbers from 2005.

Here you go:

Largest West Michigan Employers:

Employer 2008 2005

Spectrum Health 14,300 14,000

Meijer 8,290 9,700

Steelcase 5,000 5,400

Spartan Stores 4,600 4,360

Herman Miller 4,300 4,400

Amway/Alticor 4,000 4,000

St. Mary

[GRDadof3]

Wow, some of those loss numbers are just shocking YankeeFan. JCI and Haworth especially. But then again, there are some growth numbers I wasn't aware of, like Wolverine and Lacks. Gentex is just getting huge (although they just recently announced job cuts). The nice thing about Gentex' growth is that they probably picked up a lot of cut JCI people. Let's hope they can weather this storm.

I'd like to see a list of fastest growing companies in Grand Rapids and Holland. It's almost certainly not the largest employers.

[Par75]

Somewhat related, the 2009 Fortune 100 best places to work rankings came out last week and only one company headquartered in West Michigan made the list (#89 overall). There were 3 total in Michigan, the other 2 HQ'd on the East side of the state.