Profile of Small Employers in the United States and the Importance of Employee Assistance Programs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction Although, they represent the lion’s share of the American workforce, few articles specifically address the mental health and wellbeing needs and related resources for small employers. In this paper we define small businesses and their share of the U.S. workforce. Next, we review the research on the increasing burden of behavioral health disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we discuss the role of employee assistance programs (EAP) in small businesses to effectively respond to the kinds of worker health and workplace problems exacerbated by the pandemic. Small employers can be defined in several ways. In the United States, having 1 to 50 employees qualifies a company for access to the federal health care benefits associated with the Affordable Care Act. In contrast, the Small Business Association (SBA) part of the federal government generally defines its audience as employers with less than 500 employees. However, to qualify as a small business for various government loans and other SBA programs involves a complex combination involving the number of employees (ranging from under 100 to over 1000), the industry, and the total annual revenue for the company. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) conducts an annual compensation survey of employers of all sizes, industries, and sectors to assess employee wages and other employer-sponsored benefits. When combined with other national data from the Census Bureau on the number of businesses and organizations at the county level based on size of the establishment, we can create a profile of American business by company size and sector. This profile, for the most recent year available from 2021, is shown in Table 1. This data indicates that the smallest size employers, those with less than 50 workers, constitute the vast majority of all establishments in the U.S., accounting for 94.5% of the total. These workplaces employ 52.4 million workers, which is almost 40% of the total workers in the private sector. The next size up of companies with between 50 and 99 workers is only 3% of the total employers in the private sector, but they employ another 16.7 million workers (about 1 every 8 workers). All of the establishments with less than 100 employees when combined as 1 group – defined as “small employers” for this paper – account for 97.5% of all establishments and also the majority of all of the workers in the private sector (based on both total count of over 69 million workers and 52% of total workers). In the public sector in the U.S. (ie, local and state government employers; excluding federal government workers), the story is both similar and different. Although small employers (ie, under 100 workers) represent almost 60% of all establishments, these organizations employ only a small fraction of the total workers at the local and state government level (2.9% of the 1.2 million total count of employees). Thus, when both sectors are considered together, over 99% of all small employers are in the private sector, based on both number of total establishments (private = 7,798,580 vs public = 1950) and the number of total workers (private = 69,096,995 vs public = 26,835).