“Police and employers are cracking down on staff secretly working numerous full-time jobs after a rise in ‘polygamous working’”, reports The Times. This refers to the practice of someone working from home holding down more than one full-time job; apparently, there is a burgeoning network of online advice for people attempting this.
It is easy for right-wingers and free-marketeers to reflexively side with the employers here, and legally many of these ‘polygamous’ workers will be committing fraud if they have signed contracts on the basis that one or more of their jobs is their sole employment.
But setting aside for one moment the current state of the law, there is another perspective: that if a worker can work multiple jobs simultaneously to each of their employers’ satisfaction, then the combined income is the real market value of their labour – and our tendency to default to ‘full-time’ employment is a serious market failure.
It goes without saying that none of the following arguments apply to those who take on more work than they can do, and thus underperform in one or more of the roles they undertake. But in those circumstances, employers ought to be able to identify the problem – poor performance – easily enough, even without knowing about other employment.
Yet few of those cases written up by The Times really evidence this; in most examples, the worker in question is simply caught out, for example being overheard on a Zoom call. Nor would elaborate investigations by the National Fraud Initiative seem necessary to identify obvious underperformance, except perhaps to make it easier to fire someone.
Some of the tell-tale signs employers are warned to look out for are a tad baffling, too: ‘taking a long time to respond to emails’ and ‘concerted efforts to avoid scrutiny’ are fair enough, but why would the average employer complain if a staff member is ‘not taking holidays’, let alone ‘refusing promotions’. If you’re trying to employ someone, presumably you’re happy with their work.
In those circumstances, what’s actually at play is that the employer, upon discovering their employee working elsewhere, suddenly feels cheated. Even if previously content or even impressed with their performance, the employer is suddenly afflicted by a gnawing sense that they’re not getting what they’re paying for. After all, the employee is presumably doing that work on ‘company time’.
Which brings us to the fundamental injustice at the heart of ‘full-time’ employment (that is, of stipulating that a given job must be an employee’s only job): with it, an employer stakes a claim to the entire productive potential of a given worker. But no effort is made to assess, estimate, or compensate the market value of that potential.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, an employer prices a job based on the value they place on the responsibilities of that job getting done (subject to market conditions), and hire someone they think can discharge those responsibilities to a satisfactory level. At no point does it occur to them, facing an individual applicant, to try and work out the maximum potential value of that employee’s time. Yet that’s what they then insist on buying.
The result is a sort of distributed monopsonism (a monopsony is the equivalent of a monopoly, but with the power held by the buyer rather than the seller). By making contracts ‘full-time’, employers crush the market price of a worker’s labour, forcing the best of them (such as the one quoted by The Times who is on track to earn $1.2 million across five jobs) to sell it on very unfavourable terms.
Indeed, what seems to be indicated by much of this story is simply bad management and sloppy hiring. Consider the case of the mouse jiggler, ‘software that keeps a cursor active to prevent the computer going into standby mode and fooling tracking programs into thinking they are working’. A dastardly tool of the fraudster, no doubt – but is not the tracking software the bigger problem?
What does it say about management if their chosen method of monitoring their workers is not the quality and timeliness of what they produce, but whether they’re moving their mouse? Generally speaking, input-based metrics are the perverse of management which lacks the interest, or perhaps ability, to assess the real value of the work their employees actually do – of what they produce.
What does this do for productivity? At one end, it implies employers – and seemingly public-sector employers in particular – are hiring people with no real idea of how to measure their actual output. On the other, potentially highly-productive employees are faced with awful incentives.
Without a clear promotion pathway or performance bonuses, they have little reason (except perhaps impressive future employers as part of an exit strategy) not to slow-burn in order to hold formation with their colleagues. Not only is delivering surplus value without reward a mug’s game (the preserve of the Clueless in the Macleod Hierarchy), but revealing themselves to have more capacity (a 7/10 worker instead of a 3/10, per our example above) only risks inflaming their employers’ expectations of ‘what they’ve paid for’.
If five jobs can be performed to a satisfactory level (again, the crucial proviso) by one worker, victimising the worker is absurd. Either nobody has done anything wrong – the employer has priced the job on its approximate output, and is getting it – or someone on the employer side has wasted company or public money by grossly over-hiring for the position.
Nowhere in The Times report, however, is there any mention of this latter possibility; no public sector official suggests that maybe, once they’ve fired the fraudsters, they’ll reconsider how they hire. Instead, they will simply set the monopsonist’s yoke around someone else’s neck – and waste more of our money in the process.
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