The Job Market

It is important to be very clear about the difference between a job market and a labor market. The difference is a subtle one, yet all important. At first glance it may seem to the reader that the difference between buying a job and buying labor is a very small and perhaps inconsequential one: a slight shift in focus brought about by the presumably temporary power of a group of workers in a high-tech economy—such as the industrial scientists and mathematicians mentioned in chapter 2—whose labor happens to be in short supply. At the moment, these favored workers are able to make some very curious demands on their potential employers. They have constituted themselves a group of buyers and are demanding that a new kind of object—namely, jobs— offered to them before they’ll go to work. The jobs these workers are apparently most likely to purchase are those that cater to their special tastes, both in working and in living conditions. ¹ Moreover, these favored workers apparently feel free to take or turn down any job for which they qualify, pretty much as they please. Above all, the bright new objects that they are buying are apparently supplied in such abundance that if a worker turns down or quits a job, he or she can immediately choose from among a range of others.