Noun

Singular employment

Plural uncountable

employment (uncountable)

1. A use, purpose

   I expect you'll put my gift to good employ!

2. The act of employing

   The personnel director handled the whole employment procedure

3. The state of being employed

   1853 Melville, Herman Bartleby, the Scrivener, in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, New York: Penguin Books, 1968; reprint 1995 as Bartleby, ISBN 0 14 60.0012 9, p.3:

   • At the period just preceding the advent of Bartleby, I had two persons as copyists in my employment, and a promising lad as an office-boy.

4. The work or occupation for which one is used, and often paid
5. An activity to which one devotes time
6. (economics) The number or percentage of people at work

Synonyms

• employ
• hire

Antonyms

• unemployment
• underemployment

Related terms

• employ
• employable
• employed
• employee
• employer

Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as: "A person in the service of another under any contract of hire, express or implied, oral or written, where the employer has the power or right to control and direct the employee in the material details of how the work is to be performed." Black's Law Dictionary page 471 (5th ed. 1979).

In a commercial setting, the employer conceives of a productive activity, generally with the intention of generating a profit, and the employee contributes labour to the enterprise, usually in return for payment of wages. Employment also exists in the public, non-profit and household sectors. To the extent that employment or the economic equivalent is not universal, unemployment exists.

Quotes about employment:

Sourced

• One of the best maxims in determining our course in life is, to select, at the outset, that in which virtue and principle will be least likely to be put to a test, and in which, from the nature of the calling, a man may bring around him such associations and influences as will be an auxiliary in keeping him in the path of virtue.
  • Albert Barnes, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 437.

Unsourced

• "The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him."
  • Jacob Appel, playwright, Arborophilia (2005)

• "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose. Labor is life."
  • Carlyle

• "Cheerfulness is the daughter of employment; and I have known a man come home in high spirits from a funeral, merely because he has had the management of it."
  • Dr. Horne

• "Employers prefer to take honest people because honest people don’t take."
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• "Employment, which Galen calls "nature's physician," is so essential to human happiness, that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery."
  • Burton

• "Indolence is stagnation; employment is life."
  • Seneca

• 'It is observed at sea that men are never so much disposed to grumble and mutiny as when least employed. Hence an old captain, when there was nothing else to do, would issue the order to "scour the anchor."'
  • Samuel Smiles

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Wed Nov 25 23:19:52 2009