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Home Cooking on New Hires

Orange County’s largest employers combined to add 3,562 new hires over the past year, continuing a string of modest job gains in recent years.

The total number of workers at the 76 largest companies here came to 253,328 as of October, up about 1% from a year earlier. It was the third-straight year of similar-sized gains after two years of decreases during and shortly after the recession.

This week’s Business Journal list includes more companies than in previous years. It’s a mix of locally based companies and those with headquarters elsewhere in the U.S., as well as some that serve as U.S. arms of foreign corporations.

OC-based companies, which account for about 41% of the list, drove the overall job gains, combining to add about 3,600 employees here. Companies with headquarters outside OC together had a slight decrease year-over-year in terms hires for their operations here.

Companywide employment for the listed businesses, including their OC numbers, totaled 9.1 million, up about 1%.

Nearly half of the entries—32—showed a gain in local employment, while 13 companies cut their workforces. Six had no changes year-over-year, and the Business Journal made estimates for 25.

Disney

The Walt Disney Co. remained No. 1 on the list, with 26,000 employees, an increase of 1,000, or 4%. The Burbank-based company’s main operation in OC is the Disneyland Resort, which includes the Disneyland and Disney California Adventure theme parks in Anaheim, along with a handful of hotels and the Downtown Disney District.

Disneyland Resort spokesperson Suzi Brown said the 1,000 new hires are cast members, brought on in keeping with added entertainment at the parks.

The increase in jobs reflect “our continued business growth and commitment to Orange County,” Brown said.

Disney’s OC units make up about 16% of its parent company’s workforce, which totaled 166,000 employees last month after it hired 10,000 over the 12-month span.

No. 2 University of California, Irvine, grew its employment base by 2% over the past year to 22,253. The university has about 3,000 faculty members and roughly 2,600 non-teaching staffers.

Student employees tallied up to about 6,900. The university also operates UCI Medical Center, which has about 4,700 employees.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. climbed six spots to No. 6 after hiring 1,430 workers in OC, for a total of 6,000. That’s the largest increase on the list in terms of the number of new jobs.

The hiring spree here came as the Bentonville, Ark.-based company kept its total number of employees flat from last year, at 2.2 million.

Wal-Mart has its West Coast regional headquarters in Irvine, which covers California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii. A team of roughly 50 work in the office.

Wal-Mart has been pushing new store openings here with a focus on its Neighborhood Markets, which are branded as smaller, grocery-store-type operations that are expected to supplement the Wal-Mart Supercenters. Neighborhood Markets typically create about 65 jobs per store.

The retailer has 25 locations in OC, a blend of smaller and larger stores, and is planning to open a Supercenter in Garden Grove early next year, an expansion that will call for about 200 new workers.

Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp. had a 19% growth in its OC employee base to 2,995 as of last month. The gains pushed the heart valve maker up six spots to No. 29.

Edwards spokesperson Heather Chambers said the company has been hiring in research and development, as well as in its manufacturing and commercial organizations.

“One specific example of a growth area … is our transcatheter heart valve business,” Chambers said, citing a recently created unit that’s designed to support U.S. sales of the transcatheter device, which received Food and Drug Administration approval in 2011.

Edwards, a global company, has more than 8,300 workers total, a 7% increase year-over-year.

Growth came “in particular in our manufacturing operations in Draper, Utah, and Singapore, and our offices in China,” Chambers said.

Some companies increased their Orange County operations at a significantly faster pace than their overall employee bases.

They include Foothill Ranch-based sunglasses and accessories maker Oakley Inc., which boosted its OC workforce by 14%, to 2,257, while keeping its companywide expansion below 1%, for a total of 4,185 workers. The company ranked No. 40.

No. 57 Union Bank, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, also upped its OC employee base by 11%, while maintaining its companywide numbers about even year-over-year. The bank has 1,530 workers here, out of nearly 11,500 workers overall.

Companies that contracted their OC operations included Edison International, which cut its local unit by about 40%, to 2,455. The drop, which affected 1,610 workers, pushed the company down 18 spots to No. 35.

Rosemead-based Edison International had 15,134 workers companywide, a 24% slide year-over-year.

The company operates through its public utility subsidiary, Southern California Edison. It also held Santa Ana-based Edison Mission Energy as a subsidiary until the division filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2012. Edison Mission was acquired last month by Princeton, N.J.-based NRG Energy Inc. for $2.6 billion.

“[Job] reductions at Edison Mission Energy contributed both to the Orange County decrease and the companywide decrease,” said Edison International spokesperson Charles Coleman. “Additionally, Southern California Edison implemented a broad reorganization in 2013, which included department and management restructuring, as well as employee reductions. [The initiatives were] necessary to allow the utility to operate more efficiently and with lower costs in order to keep customer rates affordable.”

Coleman also said Edison International’s decision in June “to permanently retire the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station resulted in further employee reductions in 2013.”

Chicago-based Boeing Co. remained at No. 4 despite reducing the number of OC jobs by more than 500. The aircraft manufacturer now has 6,890 workers here, down about 7%. Boeing made hires elsewhere and reported a companywide increase of nearly 2,000 workers, to 173,910.

Newcomers

A couple of companies debuted on the list as they grew to meet its cutoff point of 1,000 local employees.

Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc. had 1,000 employees here as of October, up about 14% from its year-ago tally of 875. The company’s local employment makes up about 5% of its companywide workforce.

Ingram Micro, which is the world’s largest distributor of computers and other software products, grew its overall employment by 34% to 20,800 workers.

Tustin-based medical device maker MicroVention Inc. also hit the 1,000 mark after hiring 250 in the past year, a gain of 33%. The company, which has been part of Tokyo-based Terumo Corp. since 2006, notched the biggest increase on a percentage basis.

OC’s largest companies, though they’ve continued to hire, are lagging the pace of job growth managed by the county overall.

Figures provided by the state’s Employment Development Department indicate the number of jobs in OC as a whole grew about 2% from a year earlier as of October, with about 1.4 million jobs.


Download the 2013 OC’s LARGEST EMPLOYERS list (pdf)

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