For a growing number of Americans, juggling more than one job, or “polyworking,” has become just another day at the office.
The number of people with multiple full- or part-time jobs climbed to over 8.9 million in March for the first time since 1994, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the phenomenon, before ticking down slightly in April.
As a practice, it’s not so new. Think “moonlighting.”
But as a term, polyworking (and the similar “polyemployment”) is more recent. It began cropping up in human resources research and in traditional and social media after the Covid-19 pandemic as an upbeat spin on millennial workers’ reputation for taking on side hustles, trying to monetize hobbies and eschewing 9-to-5 work.
How it’s pronounced
/pä-lē-wər-kiŋ/
“It’s a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer,” said Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market.
But she added it also candy-coats the biggest reason many people do it: They have to. “There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” Ms. Hatton said.
Polyworking opportunities expanded earlier this decade as the job market began to recover from the pandemic lockdowns, said Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a labor market think tank.
“There was so much desperation for labor, some employers that might have bristled at someone working another full-time job relaxed” the rules, he said.
At the same time, the proliferation of remote office setups made it easier to clock in at multiple jobs, sometimes covertly, especially for white-collar workers. “Literally you close one tab on your computer and open another one,” Mr. Berger said.
About 50 percent of employees with multiple jobs had a four-year college degree as of last December, up from 44 percent in 2014, according to a March report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
A 2024 report by Deloitte showed that 45 percent of members of Gen Z and 36 percent of millennials had either a full- or part-time side gig.
The biggest reason for taking on extra work was that they weren’t making enough in their primary job, the survey showed.
U.S. unemployment remained historically low at 4.2 percent in April, while average hourly earnings climbed 3.8 percent, outpacing inflation, according to Labor Department data.
Still, naggingly high housing costs and bigger grocery bills have been biting into workers’ earnings.
“The way the economy’s going, you can’t live off of one job, even two jobs sometimes,” said Marcel Wizzard, 25, who lives in Hackensack, N.J., with his parents. Aiming to pay off his credit card debt, he clocks 40-hour weeks as an Amazon delivery worker and after his shifts end, he hops in his car to deliver food to Uber Eats customers.
Clouding the economic outlook is a staggering number of government layoffs, a trade war set off by the Trump administration’s tariffs and a volatile stock market.
“We are in a moment of pretty intense turmoil economically, politically and culturally,” Professor Hatton said. It is, she said, “creating a fair amount of economic anxiety, if not real hardship, so that would go a long way to explaining the drive to find extra work.”
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