# employment (economic)

a state where a person does work for pay

- Computed level: L19 (depth in the emergence graph, not abstraction)
- Status: review  ·  Domain: economics  ·  Arena: employment

## Emergence
**Emerges from:** [jobs](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-jobs.employment), [work](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-work.effort), [pay](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-pay.economic), [payment](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-payment.economic), [people](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-people.social), [state](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-state.condition)

**Through:** 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
- In 2023, Amazon employed over 1.5 million people globally to manage warehouses, delivery, and cloud computing. *(economics)*
- The U.S. Postal Service paid 440,000 workers in 2022 to sort and deliver mail across the country. *(institutions)*
- A freelance programmer in Nairobi received monthly payments from Upwork for writing code for clients in Europe. *(everyday life)*

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*Canonical: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-employment.economic*  
*Structured data: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-employment.economic.json*  
*Every definition provably resolves to space, time, energy and pattern.*