Working from home has become commonplace since the covid pandemic and many workers are keen to keep it that way. An ABC investigation found one online community whose members not only embraced working from home but manage to work multiple full-time jobs at the same time. One case study was sacked after his bosses discovered he was juggling two full-time roles for years.
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00:00 Our best source of information about that are ABS labour force survey estimates, which
00:06 would suggest that it's really not very common at all. Most multiple job holding is part-time
00:12 workers holding a second part-time job and they're predominantly young people in a labour
00:19 market where it's difficult to get a full-time job. That data suggests that full-time workers
00:24 holding a second full-time job are a very small number of workers, maybe one in a hundred
00:29 of all multiple job holders. So I don't believe it's very common at all.
00:34 Yeah, so not common, but maybe increased with the whole work from home thing during the
00:39 pandemic?
00:40 Potentially, although I suspect the occupations in which it's most likely to be occurring
00:48 would be among professional and scientific technical workers who are specialists, who
00:56 are maybe in jobs where nobody's, they don't need to be on location, possibly their second
01:03 jobs may be independent contracting jobs. And also they're possibly in jobs where their
01:08 managers don't have a really good handle on the time that it takes for them to meet their
01:15 performance targets.
01:18 And do employers have a right to insist you can only work the job that you're employed
01:23 to do, the one position?
01:25 Well, if it's in your contract, yeah, and employment contracts do contain in some organisations
01:31 and employment contracts will contain a clause preventing you from holding another job. And
01:40 so you would be breaching your contract if you breach that clause, or you may have an
01:44 anti-competition clause in your contract. Potentially, even if there's no clause in
01:50 your contract, if you are deceiving your employer in some way through maintaining that you are
01:57 available when you're not, and it may become a breach of trust, which could in itself be
02:03 a cause for dismissal.
02:04 Right, yeah. So what do you think of people doing it on the sly?
02:09 I think it really depends on who they are and why they're doing it. I suppose I wouldn't
02:16 think it was a great thing if we saw lots of people holding two jobs and doing that,
02:22 deceiving their employers, or if we had many workplaces where employers were really not
02:28 that on top of what their employees were doing. I think it's a different situation. It's
02:32 tragic if somebody in a low paid job is spending all their evenings and weekends on top of
02:39 that job doing another job, such as driving taxis or Ubers or whatever, because they can't
02:44 afford their full-time job. They can't earn enough with one full-time job. But I think
02:51 we're not saying that that's the case. Yeah, so there's no single good answer to that.
02:58 I would hate to think that everybody was feeling the need to overwork to the extent that they
03:03 needed two full-time jobs. I think that would be really bad for workplace cultures, for
03:08 our ideas of balancing, having a reasonable work-life balance, being able to meet working
03:15 care responsibilities. Yeah, so with this online story on the ABC website today, there
03:20 was apparently a case of one employer sacking an employee after he found out they were working
03:25 two jobs. Do you think if an employee was upfront about it, would any employers actually
03:34 agree to this? I suspect not. If you had an employee who admitted that their full-time
03:43 job only took them half their working time, you might think about, think twice about engaging
03:49 them on a full-time basis. Or giving them a bit more to do. So what's your advice to
03:58 people thinking of it? I would, again, I think it's really not an option open to most people.
04:07 We know from surveys that the Centre for Future Work have done, many people are doing unpaid
04:12 overtime to keep up with the demands of their work. Many people are also subject to much
04:18 closer monitoring of their work. It's not something that's necessarily, it's not, I
04:26 think it's a great idea and it's not really open to most people anyway.
04:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]