Agriculture, despite a sharp decline in gross domestic product, continues to be the largest employer in Tamil. Nadu. This is because the non-agriculture sectors are yet to generate enough employment to affect a shift of labour force.

(i) Labour force of the economy is the number of people in the country who work and are also capable of working.
(ii) We take the age group of 15-60 years for the computation of work force.

(i) The nature of employment in India is multi-dimensional. Some get employment throughout the year; some others get employed for only a few months in a year.
(ii) The economy is classified into three sectors: primary or agriculture sector, secondary or industrial sector and tertiary or service sector.
(iii) The structure of employment denotes the number of workers engaged in different sectors of the economy.
(iv) Though the occupational pattern varies from one country to another, one can find in developing countries like India that a large work force will be engaged in primary sector, while a small proportion in secondary and tertiary sectors.
(v) Whereas, in well-developed countries, the proportion of workforce engaged in agriculture will be very small and a majority of labour force will be in the industrial and tertiary sectors.
(vi) Employment has always featured as an important element of development policy in India.
(vii) Employment growth has increased at an average rate of 2% during the past four decades since 1972-73.

The trends are
(a) Increasing self-employment.
(b) Firms using fewer full-time employees and tending to offer more short-term contracts.
(c) There has been a growth in part-time employment.

Those who are engaged in economic activities, in whatever capacity -high (or) low are called employees.