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]
