The 8,137,000 in the title refers to a striking number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: that’s the number of multiple job-holders in Spring 2023. Just FYI, that would be the entire population of Cairo over here in the U.S. and holding two jobs.
A lot of people thinking about “two jobs” is very blue-collar, i.e. service or retail during the day and then driving a cab at night. That’s the standard model. However, increasingly this is happening in white-collar work as well. What happened in white-collar work, I think, is a series of intersection points:
- During early COVID, and again in early 2023, layoffs were relatively fast and brutal and without empathy. COVID was especially bad. So I think people looked around and said, “Whoa, there really is no loyalty.” If you can do two jobs at once, why not?
- Over the last 10 years, especially with the scale of SaaS, a lot of white-collar work has become insanely easy. We’ve seen studies since 2015 that average FTE (full-time, or “full-time”) employees work — in their own estimation — about 20 hours to 24 hours a week. So many companies, and specifically so many managers, are bad at allocation of resources and time and what they actually need, because so many of them hire to avoid feeling busy themselves (then feel busier because now they have to actually manage these idiots). Microsoft did an early-2023 study that reinforced some of this.
- So now you realize there’s no loyalty and work isn’t that hard. Why not go for two?
- Well, the main reason is you don’t want to get caught and lose one or both, right? I’ve simultaneously worked three full-time jobs. I did that for part of 2021. Assuming you don’t have a lot of meetings or have the option to turn down meetings, it’s nearly impossible to get caught. Most managers are too checked out. As long as you respond to them when they think something is a fire drill, you will be fine. Now, if you have a lot of meetings, it’s impossible to do this, because the meetings will overlap too much, and you’ll miss some meetings for one employer, and the boss there will get pissed, and now you’re out of that job. So that’s the hard thing.
- The other hard thing is that work can be incredibly petty. If someone who views you as a rival or threat finds out that you’re working another gig behind the boss’ back, they will tattle on you. I had a woman named Stephanie do this to me at one gig once. Basically, what had happened was: she was contract, and the boss told her that he was cutting her hours the next month. She panicked. In her defense, I think she had a kid to support, so I get it. But she found out I had other jobs and instantly ran to the boss man, who tried to corner me about it. So even if you’re managing everything time-wise, you need to remember other human beings can be petty.
- Bosses don’t like the multiple jobs thing, because they want total allegiance to them — and total control of your time. Makes sense, but the irony herein is that bosses allow the multiple jobs thing to happen by being so bad at managing and defining job role.
One of the most hysterical things about bosses whining and pouting re: “Tom has two jobs” is that those same bosses buy every CNBC and WSJ narrative of “No one wants to work anymore.” Ha. No. The real narrative is “No one wants to work below a living wage for their area anymore,” and thus they’re taking the dumb aspects of white-collar — i.e. how disorganized and absentee it often is — and using it to their advantage.
If you scroll all the way back up to the top of this article, I have a link from Work Life there. On that link, you find a HR professional who took a second full-time job, and then a consulting thing on top of that, and she quadrupled her income while juggling all of it. Who wouldn’t do that, if you have the ability? Game on.
The 8.1 million number is concerning because it shows how standard paychecks just don’t live up to the American cost of living anymore, but it’s also ironic and hysterical because white-collar demands for fealty don’t match up with white-collar job design and managerial aptitude, and that’s allowed many of us to rock multiple jobs.
Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist at ESS Inc.
3 个月One of the funnier more recent hypocrisies of the workplace. If you applied the, "people don't want to work anymore," logic to any other part of a business's supply chain it's immediately exposed as stupid, but this is the specific example that takes it to absurdity, if only because the implicit assumption of everyone one of these managers was that all these people who refused to work for them were on a welfare or disability grift of some kind, not that they were simply working elsewhere and getting better money.