{
  "id": "employment.economic",
  "term": "employment",
  "sense": "economic",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 19,
  "arena": "employment",
  "domain": "economics",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a state where a person does work for pay",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "jobs.employment",
      "work.effort",
      "pay.economic",
      "payment.economic",
      "people.social",
      "state.condition"
    ],
    "interaction": "the job provides work that is compensated with pay, creating a sustained condition for a person",
    "novel_properties": [
      "employment relationship",
      "sustained compensated effort",
      "economic dependency"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In 2023, Amazon employed over 1.5 million people globally to manage warehouses, delivery, and cloud computing.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The U.S. Postal Service paid 440,000 workers in 2022 to sort and deliver mail across the country.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "A freelance programmer in Nairobi received monthly payments from Upwork for writing code for clients in Europe.",
      "domain": "everyday life"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "state.condition",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "pay.economic",
      "note": "enables",
      "type": "enables"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "employment",
    "employments"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added missing constitutive concepts: payment.economic, people.social, and state.condition, which are essential for the definition of employment as a sustained, compensated condition involving persons."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-employment.economic"
}