Despite employment reductions among many manufacturing companies, the economy was resilient enough during the boom of the 1990s to keep unemployment low. Indeed, employers had to scramble to find qualified high-technology workers, and growing service sector employment absorbed labor resources freed by rising manufacturing productivity. Employment at Fortune magazine's top 500 U.S. industrial companies fell from 13.4 million workers in 1986 to 11.6 million in 1994. But when Fortune changed its analysis to focus on the largest 500 corporations of any kind, cranking in service firms, the 1994 figure became 20.2 million -- and it rose to 22.3 million in 1999. Thanks to the economy's prolonged vigor and all of the mergers and other consolidations that occurred in American business, the size of the average company increased between 1988 and 1996, going from 17,730 employees to 18,654 employees. This was true despite layoffs following mergers and 54