| Sumario: | The total demand for jobs, like any aggregate economic function, must be built up from individual demand functions. Because it resembles other types of demand, any individual's demand for a job depends on the availability of substitutes for it, the individual's tastes and preferences, and purchasing power. The latter, of course, is not money or income; the flow of dollars goes to the worker. Purchasing power, or what people use to buy a job, consists of their time. Taking a job requires spending one's time in a defined way for a defined period. Like the income constraint it replaces, the total time available to anyone is limited; time is a scarce resource. The notion of a job as one kind of time use finds support in scattered evidence from employment literature. For example, in collecting and tabulating data, employment must be identified as full-time or part-time. In presenting employment data, overtime, slack time, and time off recur frequently. The most recent employment issues, work sharing and flexible hours, also deal with time use. Analysts of employment are beginning to do time-use studies, although the data are incomplete.
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