Overemployed workers are channeling Durga: What's wrong with this picture?
Yahoo News reports that 70% of Americans are seeking additional work in order to combat inflation, and 6 out of 10 Americans are looking for short-term gig work. With inflation near a 40-year high in the United States, everyone is looking for ways to make more money. But having more than one job isn’t necessarily a good thing - just ask Tesla shareholders about Elon Musk’s multiple interests. Overemployment - where higher-income workers secretly work more than one full-time job - is a trend born out of necessity and driven by today’s raging inflation. But it seems the lure of more than one paycheck can be a risky business. Caught in the act of double-dipping, some employees are being fired for pursuing multiple side gigs.
Overemployment: Going Viral
In a viral LinkedIn post, Canopy CEO Davis Bell has caught flack for secretly firing two engineers who were working two jobs on the down-low. Bell makes his case: “Whenever I read stories in the media about people doing this [overemployment] I'm usually surprised that they don't make a bigger deal of the core moral issues at play: ‘working’ two full-time jobs is stealing, and it also involves a great deal of lying and deception.” In a deep-dive interview in Insider, Bell reveals that these income-twinning engineers were already making over $130,000 a year at Canopy, a Utah-based software company.
Promising that you can “work two jobs [and] reach financial freedom”, Overemployed.com is a resource for those looking to capitalize on this recent trend. But at what price freedom? With recent posts like “7 Tips to Avoid Lifestyle Creep When Making $600K”, and “$1.2M with 5 IT Jobs”, it’s easy to see the appeal of becoming overemployed when people are overwhelmed. Could your higher-wage employees be looking for alternatives, during times of rising prices (and rising employee dissatisfaction?)
Is Overemployment the Worker’s Answer to Quiet Quitting?
If one job is bad, maybe two will be better. That’s the logic behind overemployment, a trend that is finding a life of its own on Reddit. “Elon Musk gets all the praise in the world for running multiple companies, and the average guy gets called a thief by people like Canopy’s CEO for trying to work more to feed his family,” writes mike-from-oc. “Most overemployed employees are not making ‘$300-600K’” he adds.
Regardless of your tax bracket, is it wrong to pursue maximizing your income?
For most capitalistic Americans, the answer is no. However, as in all financial matters, the end doesn’t necessarily justify the means. The challenge comes in the term, “employee”. Indeed, worker classification is a ruling under debate at the highest levels of national government. The New York Times reports, “The [new employee] rule would make it more likely for millions of janitors, home-care and construction workers and gig drivers to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors.”
Overemployment: A New Working Relationship Emerges
There’s an exclusivity inside that word, “employee”. For some companies, bosses can treat your job like a serious dating relationship. If you’re seeing other people, your supervisor may not see things the same way.
Rallying on reddit, Minute-Lock6073 says, “I started telling recruiters about my interest in a second job,” the cloud computing specialist explains. “Both of my managers know that I am ‘OE’”. For some, saying what it is that you want, and explaining who you are, may be enough to gain leniency about your desire for overemployment. And what’s wrong with trying to earn as much as you can?
For American employees at all levels, making more money isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But how you go about doing that is where the leadership challenge arises. Are you in an open relationship with your employer?
Is Overemployment Deception, or Just Capitalism?
Here are some warning signs that Bell offers to business leaders. “None of these are by themselves an indication of a problem,” Bell shares. But leaders look here: consider the sum of the parts, to know if your employees might be considering overemployement:
- Rather than updating LinkedIn to reflect that they work at Canopy [Bell’s company], made LinkedIn profile private upon accepting our offer.
- Didn't sign up for benefits (not always an indication of something wrong, but true) [for the engineers he fired]
- Defaulted to having camera off in meetings.
- Slow response times on Slack/email.
- Frequently late to or absent for meetings with no explanation.
- Worked for very large companies, where it seems it may be easier to hang out and hide divided efforts.
It’s no secret: the workforce is disengaged. But at companies wanting to attract and retain top talent, leadership must stay engaged as well - connecting with employees, so that overemployment isn’t a surprise.
When professional fakers are offering to take job interviews, and taking on more than one job is seen as a logical of extension of capitalism, perhaps it’s time for business to get personal. Given that inflation is rising, and ambition never goes away, what can you do to connect with your employees? Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the employer-employee relationship. Looks like overemployment is just one way that many employees are trying to balance earnings, inflation, and disengagement - in an economy struggling to find the right labels for the job at hand.
