Abstract: Employment is not only the biggest livelihood project, but also an important guarantee of social stability. Economy and environment are important factors affecting employment, so it is of great significance to study the direction and mechanism of their influence on employment, to realize full employment. Different from existing research which exams the influence of a single factor, either economy or environment, on employment, this paper creatively puts economy and environment into the same analysis framework, using 2008—2017 data of 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government to build a dynamic panel model, and study economic growth and air pollution as well as their employment effect and interaction mechanism. The results are as follows. First, the employment effects of the two factors are different: economic growth is conducive to the expansion of labor employment scale, while air pollution has a negative impact on it. In addition, different gender groups have heterogeneity. Compared with female labor force, male labor force employment is more sensitive to economic growth and air pollution. Second, the interaction of economic growth and air pollution has further influence on labor employment, which has a significant promoting effect in the whole country and the eastern region, and a significant inhibiting effect in the central and northeast regions. The interaction term has no obvious effect on labor employment in the western region. Based on the above conclusions, in this paper, some policy suggestions are put forward, such as improving air quality to increase labor supply, promoting coordinated development of economy and environment according to local conditions to expand regional employment scale, etc.