The city administration in Munich has about 33000 employees.
Since parts of the city administration were privatised in the 90s (municipal utilities with 8000 employees, public transport with 3000 employees, hospital with 9000 employees) the number was higher in the past.
The police is employed by the state (Bavaria), not the city, so they don’t figure into this number, either.
I looked over the list of job advertisements and the offered jobs are quite diverse. Lots of clerks, obviously, but also engineers, mechanics, plumbers, all kinds of IT jobs, lawyers, one painting restorer, all kinds of child care workers and teachers, headmasters, medical doctors, editors, cooks …
Teachers are a pretty big group (and the only one I could easily find numbers for): 4500 teachers for 72000 students in the city.
You do need quite a lot of people to run a city. Of course, this always also depends on what exactly the city does, what is privatised and what is done by other levels of government.
Obviously not all of those need their own personal computer for their work (some don’t need a computer at all), but many do.
Altogether about seven percent (that’s about one in 14) of Americans work for the government (I think it’s about six percent in Germany, so a very similar number), so the number for Munich’s local government shouldn’t really surprise you.
That doesn't seem high at all. What's you're frame of reference?
State of Georgia, US (likely a small government state)
Population: 9M
State employees: 82k
Ratio: 109:1
Add in county and city, and it's right in line.
You can cut this various ways, but the ratio seems within the range of normal. I would like more data for comparison, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.
The number of people it takes to maintain rule of law, social services, etc. is not a small undertaking and also doesn't ebb as much as the private sector due to the need for consistent levels of service.
Police and fire correlate pretty tightly to population and geography (size). Similarly, licensing, inspection, etc. etc. scale with population. Tiers of management necessarily increase with increases in head count for larger municipalities at fairly standard ratios. For similarly sized populations in wealthy cities and states, I wouldn't expect extreme divergence if services provided are roughly equivalent.
Phoenix, AZ is roughly the same size an Munich (1.38M) and has 17,000 city employees. That's 1 CE to 81 residents.
Not if you're European. I don't have the numbers for Germany, but here in Denmark somewhere between 30 to 40% of the workforce are employed by the government ( city/country/state ).
"From June 30, 2002 through June 30, 2013, city staffing decreased by 9,028 positions and totaled 295,894 by the end of fiscal year 2013, a 3.0 percent decline."
Police are employed by the state (Bavaria in Munich) in Germany, but the rest should be included. Teachers and all kinds of other child care workers definitely are. If it isn’t done by the church child care is usually organised by the city. Public schools are the norm (only about six percent of students in Germany go to private schools). Munich has 4500 full time teachers for 72000 students.
Municipal utilities, public transport and the hospital were all privatised in the 90s, so those aren’t included (about 20,000 employees).
Really, to compare the numbers you have to go through them item by item. However, Munich’s number doesn’t seem high compared to US numbers for local government.
