Published: September 21, 2008 02:37 am      

Wal-Mart state’s top private employer

According to new study by research office of WorkForce West Virginia

FAIRMONT — As it has been since 1998, Wal-Mart Associates Inc. is the state’s largest private employer, according to a new study by the research office of WorkForce West Virginia.

Wal-Mart has opened new stores in Kingwood, Hurricane and Martinsburg in the past year.

Three major hospitals and a nursing home chain are also among the top 10 private sector employers.

West Virginia University Hospitals and United Hospital Center are the state’s second-largest employer. The Charleston Area Medical Center Inc. was third, while St. Mary’s Medical Center in Huntington was ninth. Eldercare Resources Corp. was seventh.

Consolidation Coal Co. was 10th, edging back into the top 10 as the state’s coal industry surged, the state agency said in its annual report on private employers.

Rounding out the top 10 were Kroger (fourth, the supermarket chain added a new store in Morgantown), CSX/CSX Hotels Inc. (fifth, railroad operations and The Greenbrier), American Electric Power (sixth) and Lowe’s Home Centers Inc. (eighth).

The report covers the period from the first quarter (January-March) of 2007 through the first quarter of this year. The annual report was released Friday.

The agency doesn’t report employee totals, said Ben Parker.

“We get the information from quarterly reports to the unemployment compensation insurance commission,” he said.

The agency sees employee totals by company and it uses them to compile its report on the 100 largest private-sector employers. But it agrees to keep the employee totals confidential with the reporting employers, he said.

The other source for the WorkForce report is the federal and state Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages Program. The federal Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics collects those statistics in the state.

The report is online at this address: www.wvbep.org/bep/ lmi. The online report also includes a county-by-county breakdown for each year since 1999.

The top 10 businesses hired over 1,600 additional employees in the period covered by the report.

The employment increase “nearly matched the total increase for the state,” the agency said in a press release.

E-mail Bill Byrd at bbyrd@timeswv.com.