The man on the Clapham omnibus now likely has a side hustle. Or two. Or three.
The latest labour market figures, released this morning, show that the number of people working multiple jobs has surged to a record high of nearly 1.3 million. That is a 15% jump in a year, and the highest since records began in 1992.
Behind the statistic is a quiet revolution in how we work and, more tellingly, how we live. This is not the gig economy of zipsters and scooter couriers. This is the mainstream.
Schoolteachers driving Ubers after the final bell. Office administrators stacking shelves at Tesco on Saturday mornings. Graphic designers walking dogs at dawn.
The phrase ‘I live in survival mode’ has become a mantra for a generation. It is a phrase that captures a particular kind of British stoicism: we do not complain, we just get on with it, but the ‘it’ has become heavier, more precarious. The drivers are familiar: frozen wages, the housing crisis, the cost of living.
But what is less discussed is the psychic toll. When work becomes a relentless treadmill, the boundary between professional and personal dissolves. The dinner table becomes a second desk.
The evening commute is replaced by a shift in a different part of town. Social life, already eroded by Netflix and the pandemic, shrinks further. There is no time for the pub, the book club, the volunteer work that once oiled the wheels of community.
And what of those who cannot keep up? The official figures capture only those who declare multiple jobs. There are the shadow millions who toil in cash-in-hand work, the ‘off-grid’ economy of babysitting, tutoring, handyman tasks.
They are the true invisible army. The government’s ‘back to work’ schemes, with their rhetoric of ‘incentivising employment’, miss the point. People are not lazy.
They are exhausted. The labour market is not broken in the way it was in the 1980s, with dole queues and boarded-up factories. It is broken in a quieter, more insidious way.
It is broken from within. The multi-job worker is a symptom, not a solution. And unless we address the root causes, the survival mode will become a permanent state of being.
