Labor Market

A Labor Market is a nominal market of work contracts in which workers (of a labor population) are matched with worker jobs (of a jobs population from employers demanding able workers).

• Context:
  • It can (often) be measured with a Labor Market Measure (such as labor market size, labor market demand, labor market supply).
  • It can (typically) determine a Worker Wage Rate.
  • It can (typically) be affected by a Labor Market Institution (such as labor regulations, labor unions, ...).
  • It can range from being a Healthy Labor Market to being an Unhealthy Labor Market (such as a failed labor market).
  • It can range from being a Tight Labor Market to being a Loose Labor Market.
  • It can range from being a Formal Labor Market to being a Casual Labor Market.
  • It can range from being a Global Labor Market to being a Regional Labor Market (such as a local labor market).
  • It can be a mechanism to Distribute Claims on an Economy's Productivity.
  • It can be facilitated by a Recruiting Service.
  • It can be influenced by Price Inflation, ...
  • It can be analyzed by a Labor Economic Analysis (possibly within a [Labor Economics Discipline]]).
  • It can be characterized by a Capital and Labor Substitution Elasticity Measure.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • a Regional Labor Market, such as:
    • a Global Labor Market, ..., European Labor Market, North American Labor Market, …
    • a National Labor Market, such as: a U.S. Labor Market, German Labor Market, Canadian Labor Market, Chinese Labor Market, India Labor Market, ...;
    • a State/Province Labor Market, such as: a California Labor Market, ...;
    • a Urban Area Labor Market, such as: a San Francisco Bay Area Labor Market, ...;
  • a Software Programmer Market, Anesthesiologist Market, Taxi Driver Market, Cashier Market, Massage Therapist Market, ... .
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Working Horse Population.
  • an Industrial Robot Population (within the robotics market).
  • an Online Physical Item Auction.
  • a Capital Market.
  • a Stock Market.
• See: Human Capital, Market (Economics), Wage Labor, Economics, Factors of Production, Land (Economics), Capital (Economics).

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References

2017a

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_economics Retrieved:2017-5-31.
  • Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour.

    Labour markets or job markets function through the interaction of workers and employers. Labour economics looks at the suppliers of labour services (workers) and the demanders of labour services (employers), and attempts to understand the resulting pattern of wages, employment, and income.

    In economics, labour is a measure of the work done by human beings. It is conventionally contrasted with such other factors of production as land and capital. There are theories which have developed a concept called human capital (referring to the skills that workers possess, not necessarily their actual work).

2017b

• http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-market.asp
  • QUOTE: The labor market refers to the supply and demand for labor, in which employees provide the supply and employers the demand. It is a major component of any economy, and is intricately tied in with markets for capital, goods and services.

    … At the macroeconomic level, supply and demand are influenced by domestic and international market dynamics, as well as factors such as immigration, the age of the population, and education levels. Relevant measures include unemployment, productivity, participation rates, total income and GDP.

    At the microeconomic level, individual firms interact with employees, hiring them, firing them, and raising or cutting wages and hours. The relationship between supply and demand influences the hours the employee works and compensation she receives in wages, salary and benefits.

2017c

• https://medium.com/basic-income/cutting-the-gordian-knot-of-technological-unemployment-with-unconditional-basic-income-e8df7f8eaa16
  • QUOTE: … To live we must eat. To eat we must have money. To have money we must sell our labor. There is no real option to just live off the land with our own sweat because all the land is owned. And so we must toil for those who own land. …

2014

• (Levy & Murnane, 2014a) ⇒ Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane. (2014). “Dancing with Robots: Human Skills for Computerized Work.” In: Third Way.
  • QUOTE: … it is a safe bet that the human labor market will center on three kinds of work: solving unstructured problems, working with new information, and carrying out non-routine manual tasks. The rest will be done by computers and low wage workers abroad. ...

• (Freeman, 2014) ⇒ Richard B. Freeman. (2014). “Who Owns the Robots Rules the World.” In: IZA World of Labor Journal, May.
  • QUOTE: Employment, however, is just one side of the labor market calculus. What happens to wages is also important to well-being. If robots take the good jobs at high pay and humans get the low-pay leftovers, the living standards of persons dependent on labor income will fall. In such a scenario, Luddite fears would appear more realistic than assurances that comparative advantage guarantees work for all in a well-functioning economy.

    But economics has a response to this danger. Herbert Simon’s 1965 analysis of technological change showed that, in a well-functioning market economy, labor gains from labor-saving and capital-saving technologies — as long as the labor supply curve is less elastic than the capital supply curve [6]. In a full-employment economy, any technological advance raises the pay for the input, with inelastic supply relative to the input with elastic supply. By treating capital as elastic and labor as inelastic, Simon essentially put Malthus upside down.

    The historical facts fit Simon’s model.

    On the price side, the real return to capital has been roughly constant in the long run, which implies an infinitely elastic supply curve, while real wages have trended upward. On the quantity side, the stock of physical capital and the stock of knowledge capital have increased massively relative to labor. The world population has grown but birth rates have plummeted as societies have become richer, suggesting that population growth will continue to fall far short of the growth of knowledge and capital. But Simon treated labor as homogeneous, and ignored the distribution of ownership of robots and related machines that is central to analyzing the impact of robots / mechanization on society.

2013

• http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/labor-market.html
  • QUOTE: The nominal market in which workers find paying work, employers find willing workers, and wage rates are determined.

     Labor markets may be local or national (even international) in their scope and are made up of smaller, interacting labor markets for different qualifications, skills, and geographical locations. They depend on exchange of information between employers and job seekers about wage rates, conditions of employment, level of competition, and job location.

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