Remote work makes it easier than ever for employees to work part-time. But how do they deal with conflicting meetings and two bosses? Is the reward worth a lie?

Last modified on Wednesday, November 17, 2021 03.59 EST

The second job can be very profitable-just ask any MP who has earned at least £6 million from their part-time job since the pandemic began. But it's not just members of Congress who benefited from the second job: ordinary white-collar workers are also beginning to get involved. These workers are not just in positions that may require several days of work a month. Instead, they take care of several traditional full-time jobs at the same time and keep secrets from other employers—in fact, they lead multiple lives.

Among them is Jamie, a 25-year-old British. During the lockdown, Jamie found himself spending a lot of time playing video games every working day. His role as a software engineer is not demanding, and he is hardly monitored by the company. This allows him to live a comfortable life, but his salary he thinks is meager.

Finally, he thought of an idea: What if he could spend his free time on making more money? After noticing the increase in remote job vacancies during the lock-in period, he decided to apply for a full-time position in software development, but did not give up his software engineering.

After working in these two jobs for a few months, Jamie managed to conceal his double life from his two bosses, and his salary is now twice the original. "It's much easier than I thought," he said. "The expectations of both companies are very low, so I didn't really try to get rid of the two jobs."

The remote work boom brought about by the pandemic, in which the proportion of people working from home has almost doubled between 2019 and 2020, leading to an increase in online communities. For example, Jamie worked under multiple moonlights, and in some cases There are as many as four full-time occupations. Jamie is part of a growing online community of "overemployed" workers, which functions much like a support group, providing support to those who have adopted or plan to adopt overemployment.

The community was founded in April by Isaac, a 37-year-old American tech worker who launched overpaid.com: Articles on the site celebrate the benefits of having more than one full-time job and provide advice on everything From filing U.S. tax returns to keeping managers' expectations low. There is also a subreddit forum, r/overpaid and Discord (an instant messaging platform where users can voice chat with members of different communities, called "servers") groups with 6,500 members, users can be in these groups Share the experience anonymously in China.

Isaac began looking for other jobs after hearing about the company's layoffs. He claimed that after successfully finding a new job while sticking to his main occupation, he realized that he could do both - and increased his salary from US$160,000 (£120,000) to US$340,000. "Completing two remote jobs at the same time has happened; this is the biggest open secret in the tech world," said Isaac, who has been overemployed for more than a year. "The pandemic just accelerated this trend and made the environment not only more technology friendly."

Taking on side jobs is a common feature of modern employment, especially for odd jobs who make a living through applications such as TaskRabbit and Uber. But doing different full-time jobs remotely is controversial and has specific risks. From a tax perspective, overemployment is technically legal in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the UK, a second job may change the tax laws for workers, but this will not be clearly marked as the first employer’s wage department as a second job, and may be overlooked in large companies. In the United States, the situation is simpler because the country’s tax system is based on the principles of self-assessment and voluntary reporting.

However, overemployment may violate contracts or "non-compete" agreements. Being caught may cost someone all their full-time jobs and may make it more difficult to obtain another job in the future. Therefore, overemployment may be worrying: “I had a panic attack on the first day of two jobs,” said Callum, a British financial worker in his 20s. "Then I just need to be strong and continue.

This arrangement is obviously quite different from the second "job" performed by some congressmen, but considering that the extra work can support others, overemployment will still cause moral problems for workers. This is part of the reason why Sam, a 23-year-old American worker, finally gave his third job to his sister who was struggling to find a job. "I just gave her my company login name and told her what to do," he explained. "I went to the meeting to show my face, and she would do most of the work."

Others said they felt guilty for cheating on their boss. However, overemployed workers generally believe that as long as they meet the expectations of their employers, there is no reason to worry. "I want my family to live a comfortable life, and I'm not entirely gambling or alcoholism. If both companies are satisfied with my performance, why should I feel guilty?" wrote an overemployed person on Discord Worker. Others quickly cited the false loyalty of employees to their employers. As another employee wrote on Discord: "They won't feel sad because they replace you in one second."

Although some remote jobs are more likely to lead to overemployment than others, conflicts are almost inevitable. At the same time, meetings are a problem frequently encountered by over-employed workers, as are training and induction training, which is particularly demanding on workers’ schedules. "You have to either mute both without the camera, or act as if you can't attend one of them because you are very busy," Jamie explained how he attended the meeting. "I didn't encounter any problems, it was cold."

For an employee, when they all start asking him questions and he unmutes the wrong microphone to speak, trying to do both meetings in a muted state is counterproductive. "I didn't blow it, but I was horrified," he said in a Discord post. Most people agree that the key to avoiding this panic is to ensure that at least one job is not demanding. Otherwise, overemployment is almost impossible.

Isaac insists that the chance of being seized is still low, especially when workers take the recommended precautions, ranging from using separate computers across jobs to creating false personal data. But occasionally there will be horror stories. In the United States, Damian eventually lost his two full-time jobs because his "J1" boss and his "J2" were good friends, and his name appeared in the conversation between them. "Since my employment agreement does not have a'no J2 clause', things are going very fast," Damian explained in an article on Discord. Some overemployed workers have become accustomed to using different nicknames in different jobs to prevent a crash like Damien's.

In the so-called "big resignation", it seems surprising that a large number of workers change or resign for leisure, and people will actively seek more jobs. Isaac is keen to emphasize that "overemployment is not overwork"-many overemployed workers seem to agree. Jamie said: "In this way, my stress will definitely be reduced, and it will keep my mind busy and refreshing."

Callum described it as "a way for workers to take control of their lives without succumbing." He added: "Nine to five is officially dead. The company can accept this and give us freedom." Others use overemployment as an opportunity to optimize skills or explore other careers.

On his website, Isaac views overemployment as a means to earn more income now in order to achieve financial freedom in the future. But Phil Jones, author of "Works Without Workers: Labor in the Age of Platform Capitalism," is skeptical. "Sacrificing one's time for a later return is a promise that capitalism has made since the 19th century, and only a few people have fulfilled it," he said. In the context of an epidemic that has devastated people’s livelihoods, this promise sounds even more hollow.

Jones also questioned the view that overemployment is a way for workers to regain control. "In a world that often seems to be out of control, work often gives people an illusion of control," he said. "It shows in a very clear way how much work has colonized our imagination [and] is a manifestation of society’s addiction to work."

For overemployed workers: "It seems that vacations are not really used for other leisure activities. On the contrary, when people have more time each day, when they can get away with not working, what do they choose to do? Work more and earn more money. Jones pointed to the fact that overemployed workers often represent people who are financially safer—for example, technicians, who have higher skills requirements—and therefore are not necessarily people who need more work but are choosing jobs. .

Of course, this is not the case in the entire overemployed community: Katya, 47, from Northern California, felt compelled to accept another job when her son died and the hospital bill she left behind plunged her into debt. "I can't even let my next son go to college, it breaks my heart," she said. After contacting other companies on LinkedIn, she decided to interview for a second salary job, and she succeeded.

This started six years ago, long before Katya discovered the over-employed community: “I thought I was the only one who did this, and it felt very bad for a while,” she recalled. "But I can finally pay the bills and get food without worrying about what else I need my money for."

However, it is inevitable that this kind of "overemployment" based on remote work is beyond the reach of many low-paid workers. A survey by the National Bureau of Statistics found that working from home is concentrated in the wealthy areas of London. More than half of managers, directors, senior officials and professional employees work in this way, while the percentage of cleaners, factory workers and drivers is less than that. 10%. Jobs with lower wages, even in remote areas, are more likely to be subject to stricter monitoring, making it impossible to achieve overemployment. For example, the call center was accused of intrusively monitoring domestic workers during Covid-19.

"The fact that some people can choose multiple jobs and earn more income than anyone might need, while others are forced to work on multiple jobs to make ends meet — even struggling to survive — shows that the labor market is positive. It becomes more and more irrational and unbalanced," Jones observed. "If the work culture is not significantly changed through policies or through a stronger labor movement, the labor market will become increasingly polarized between overemployment and underemployment."

So, what does overemployment mean to the future of work? "One way that particularly enthusiastic employers may address overemployment is to pay workers on a project basis instead of hiring full-time employees," Jones said. He suspects that high-paying white-collar jobs will increasingly be "eliminated" in this way, such as accounting and translation jobs promoted on platforms such as Upwork. This is supported by a recent report from the Institute of Future Work, which stated that bosses increasingly want to abandon full-time employees in favor of odd jobs that can complete on-call tasks.

In this sense, overemployed workers may be seen as canaries in coal mines in an increasingly fragmented world of work. In fact, what we know from 9 to 5 is likely to be dying. But if it only benefits a small group of white-collar workers, it may replicate and consolidate existing inequalities.

Part of the name has been changed

This article was revised on November 16, 2021. The earlier version said that part-time workers had increased; this was changed to make it clear that this specifically refers to the online community of these workers.