The Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ monthly report contains a figure that seldom makes news, but it may be the most accurate representation of how exhausted American workers have become. The percentage of employed individuals who work multiple jobs is known as the multiple jobholder rate, and it recently increased to 5.8%, its highest level since December 1999.
That equates to over 8.5 million people working twice or even three times in a single week. As a hedge against rent increases, grocery bills, and paychecks that haven’t kept up with much, rather than as a side gig for fun money. This figure may reveal more about the true situation of American workers than the unemployment rate ever could.
Anyone who has recently taken on a second job will tell you stories that sound familiar. When the school day is over, a teacher delivers groceries. Because the hospital schedule is insufficient to pay the mortgage, a nurse is working weekends at urgent care. People don’t seem to be motivated by ambition anymore. It’s math.
The picture becomes heavier when you include the wider fatigue data. According to extensive research from the Families and Work Institute, approximately 44% of American workers report feeling overworked frequently or extremely frequently. According to different surveys conducted this year, the percentage of workers experiencing job burnout ranges from 66 to 79 percent, depending on the question. Given how much of the work-life balance debate has focused on younger workers, those in their twenties and early thirties report the highest rates of all. This is a subtle irony.
Americans already put in more hours each year than workers in nearly every other wealthy country; this disparity has been known for decades. It’s not really the hours that have changed. It’s what those hours purchase. A portion of working people are busier and in some ways less secure than they were a generation ago because wages have changed, but housing, healthcare, and childcare have changed more quickly.
This is the reason the moonlighting number is the most illuminating in the dataset. It is possible for unemployment to decline, job opportunities to remain stable, and the labor market to appear healthy by all textbook metrics while more people are silently working themselves to death in order to remain motionless. It’s a type of fatigue that, unless you know exactly where to look, doesn’t appear on a jobs report.
This place also contains a trap. Employees who are overworked seldom have the time to look for new employment, bargain for a raise, or retrain for something better. Exhaustion turns into a form of inertia of its own. Instead of staying put because they are content, people stay put because looking for something new requires energy that they don’t have after a sixty-hour workweek.
Employers appear to be aware of the strain but are not fully addressing it. Compared to a year or two ago, fewer employees now think their employer truly cares about their mental health. Leaner staffing, layoff anxiety, and return-to-office requirements have added to the already existing weariness, and it’s still unclear if businesses will make the necessary adjustments before more employees burn out permanently.
Watching this number tick upward, it’s hard not to wonder what it would actually take to bring it back down, and whether anyone in charge is watching it closely enough to notice.
