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Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. In a commercial setting, the employer conceives of a productive activity, generally with the intention of creating profits, and the employee contributes labour to the enterprise, usually in return for payment of wages.
Employment also exists in the public, nonprofit and household sectors.
In the United States, the "standard" employment contract is considered to be at-will meaning that the employer and employee are both free to terminate the employment at any time and for any cause, or for no cause at all.
To the extent that employment or the economic equivalent is not universal, unemployment exists.
Employment is almost universal in capitalist societies. Opponents of capitalism such as Marxists oppose the capitalist employment system, considering it to be unfair that the people who contribute the majority of work to an organization do not receive a proportionate share of the profit. However, the surrealist and the situationist movements were among the few groups to actually oppose work, and during the partially surrealist-influenced events of May 1968 the walls of the Sorbonne were covered with anti-work graffiti.
Labourers often talk of "getting a job", or "having a job". This conceptual metaphor of a "job" as a possession has led to its use in slogans such as "money for jobs, not bombs". Similar conceptions are that of "land" as a possession (real estate) or intellectual rights as a possession (intellectual property).
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An employer is a person or institution that hires employees or workers. Employers offer wages to the workers in exchange for the worker's labor-power.
Employers include everything from individuals hiring a babysitter to governments and businesses which hired many thousands of employees. In most western societies governments are the largest single employers, but most of the work force is employed in small and medium businesses in the private sector.
Note that although employees may contribute to the evolution of an enterprise, the employer maintains autonomous control over the productive base of land and capital, and is the entity named in contracts. The employer typically also maintains ownership of intellectual property created by an employee within the scope of employment and as a function thereof. These are known as "works for hire".
Within large organizations the management of employees is often handled by Human Resources departments.
An employee is any person hired by an employer – typically, a worker hired to do a specific "job". Typical examples include accountants, solicitors, lawyers, photographers, among many other worker categorizations.
There are differing classes of employee. Some are permanent and receive a guaranteed salary, while others are hired on short term contracts or as consultants. In this respect, it is important to distinguish independent contractors who are treated differently both in law and in most taxation systems.
The employee contributes labour and expertise to an endeavour. Employees perform the discrete activity of economic production. Of the three factors of production, employees usually provide the labor.
Some companies feel that a happier work force is a better one and thus offer extra benefits to improve team spirit and performance. However, other employers try to increase profits by giving low wages and few benefits. To resist this, employees can organize into labor unions (American English), or trade unions (British English), who represent most of the available work force and must therefore be listened to by the management. This is the source of considerable bad feeling between the two sides, and sometimes even violence.
An individual who entirely owns the business for which he labours is known as self-employed, although if a self-employed individual has only one client for whom he performs work, he may be considered an employee of that client for tax purposes. Self-employment often leads to incorporation. Incorporation offers certain protections of one's personal assets. Laws of incorporation vary from state to state with California having the most incorporated businesses of any state in the U.S.
Workers who are not paid wages, such as volunteers, are generally not considered as being employed.
Someone who works under obligation for the purpose of fulfilling a debt without pay is known as a slave and slaveowners are also not considered employers. Some historians suggest that slavery is older than employment, but both arrangements have existed for all recorded history.
Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School
Death on the Job, Filmmakers: William Guttentag and Vince DiPersio,1991
Office Space, written and directed by Mike Judge.
Links to park ranger jobs in Australia can be found at http://naturalresource.alphalink.com.au
Income, generally defined, is the money that is received as a result of the normal business activities of an individual or a business. For example, most individuals' income is the money they receive from their regular paychecks.
In business and accounting, income (also known as profit or earnings) is, more specifically, the amount of money that a company earns after paying for all its costs. To calculate a company's income, it starts with its amount of revenue, deducts all costs, including such things as employees' salaries and depreciation, and the number that results is its income, which may be a negative number. This money is typically reinvested in the business, paid in corporate tax and used to pay the owners (the shareholders) a dividend.
All public companies are required to provide financial statements on a quarterly basis. The statement of income is an important part of this. Some companies also provide a more rosy financial report of their income, with pro forma reporting, or, EBITDA reporting. Pro forma income is an estimate of how much the company would have earned without including the negative effect of exceptional "one-time events", supposedly in order to show investors how much money the company would have made under normal circumstances if these exceptional, one-time events had not occurred. Critics charge that, in most cases, the "one-time events" are normal business events, such as an acquisition of another company or a write off of a cancelled project or division, and that pro forma reporting is an attempt to mislead investors by painting a rosy financial picture. Besides that, when discussing results with analysts and shareholders CEOs and CFOs have a tendency to do even more "hypothetical accounting". EBITDA stands for "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation", and is also criticised for being an attempt to mislead investors. Warren Buffett has criticised EBITDA reporting, famously asking, "Does management think the tooth fairy pays for capital expenditures?"
It is common for some other companies, such as real estate investment trusts, to present reports using a standard called FFO, or funds from operations. Like EBITDA reporting, FFO ignores depreciation and amortization. This is widely accepted in the industry, as real estate values tend to increase rather than decrease over time, and many data sites report earnings per share data using FFO.
In economics, income is the constraint to unlimited consumer purchases. Consumers can purchase a limited number of goods. The basic equation for this is I = Px × x + Py × y, where Px is the price of good x, x is the quantity of good x, and I is the income (Py and y are similar to Px and x). If you need to examine more than two goods, you can add more on. This equation tells us two things. First, if you buy one more of good x, you get Px/Py less of good y. Here, Px/Py is known as the rate of substitution. Secondly, if the price of x changes, then the rate of substitution changes. This causes demand curves to slope down.
The distribution of income within a society can be measured by the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient.
National income, measured by statistics such as the Net National Income (NNI), measures the total income of all individuals in the economy. For more information see measures of national income and output.