UBS bucks hiring trend among biggest employers

In the past year, UBS AG has added 430 workers in Stamford, an indication of both financial market activity and the company”™s confidence in its ability to find good workers here.
As the first quarter drew to a close, however, most of Fairfield County”™s remaining large employers appear to be hewing to the conventional economic wisdom ”“ with continued uncertainty surrounding the stock market, home values and energy prices, don”™t expect major local employment gains this year.
The 25 largest employers in Fairfield County reduced the size of their local work forces by 1.2 percent, according to a new survey by the Fairfield County Business Journal, with UBS the lone corporate entity to report a significant increase at its Stamford facility.
UBS still has a ways to go to catch Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., which reported having 7,100 workers in eastern Fairfield County, flat from a year ago. Yale University is the top employer in New Haven County with more than 11,000 employees at last count, and IBM Corp. remains the dominant employer in Westchester County, N.Y., with 7,500 workers.
With nearly 4,400 workers, UBS AG is drawing closer to No. 2 General Electric Inc., which reported having 5,300 employees in its home county.
Providing only a snapshot in time, the work force numbers can fluctuate depending on how companies classify employees; whether they are launching or concluding major initiatives; whether they are rounding up or down in significant numbers; and whether or not they have made significant local acquisitions or divestments. Moreover, information from significant local employers such as Diageo, SAC Capital and Unilever AG either could not be confirmed or arrived too late for publication.
In the aggregate, however, the survey shows the prevailing winds on work force trends.
Year by year, longtime Fairfield County fixtures like Xerox Corp. and Pitney Bowes Inc. are getting overtaken by relative upstarts locally like UBS, SAC and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., which are counting on Fairfield County to provide proximity to high-quality workers, important customers and corporate partners.
Connecticut hedge funds and private equity firms, the bulk of which are located in Fairfield County, have added 10,000 jobs since 2001, estimates Lincoln Dyer, an economist with the Connecticut Department of Labor. Such funds have accounted for 80 percent of the growth in the state”™s financial sector statewide.
The burgeoning financial sector is translating into growth in adjacent employment sectors such as information services. FactSet Research Systems Inc., which did not provide employment data until after the list”™s deadline, now employs 475 people at its Norwalk headquarters and plans to add more. The company provides data that money managers and traders use to manage their financial portfolios.
On a net basis, Fairfield County added 3,900 jobs over the past year.
“We now have gained back more than 50,000 of the 60,000 jobs we lost between 2000 and 2003,” said John Tirinzonie, another Department of Labor economist, referring to the overall state employment figures. “If we can keep a modest rate of growth this year, we may hit our all-time high.”
Some 35 percent of Connecticut companies intend to increase the size of their work forces in the near term, according to a first-quarter survey by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, with just 12 percent expecting to cut positions. Companies say they expect gains despite just 8 percent of those polled expecting an improvement in the state economy, and more than half anticipating wage and benefit inflation. One in five of the companies polled are based in Fairfield County.