Last summer –as in all the way back in 2019–I wrote this post about how multiple jobholding had become more common in the labor force overall and how this seemed to be a “new normal” for the (very strong 2019) economy–something no longer limited to recessionary times when people might be forced to piece together several smaller jobs when they couldn’t get a full-time job. I underscored my finding that multiple jobholding was becoming especially more prevalent among working women, and I hypothesized on some reasons why, including: (i) women need multiple jobs to add up to the pay of one job (because women typically earn less than men); (ii) women choose to work multiple jobs to add up to the hours of one full-time job–yet with the greater flexibility/control over work schedule that multiple part-time jobs allow; and (iii) women often choose to “work” not to maximize earnings but for personal fulfillment, which often calls for a variety of work whether paid or underpaid or unpaid, rather than just one job.
In 2019 all these reasons were already, in the slow-but-steady recovery from the Great Recession, becoming part of the “new normal” of an economy and labor market increasingly dominated by women. Last week I learned of this new Census analysis based on a new measure of multiple jobholding:
We create a measure of multiple jobholding from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data. This new series shows that 7.8 percent of persons in the U.S. are multiple jobholders, this percentage is pro-cyclical, and has been trending upward during the past twenty years. The data also show that earnings from secondary jobs are, on average, 27.8 percent of a multiple jobholder’s total quarterly earnings. Multiple jobholding occurs at all levels of earnings, with both higher- and lower-earnings multiple jobholders earning more than 25 percent of their total earnings from multiple jobs. These new statistics tell us that multiple jobholding is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.
“A New Measure of Multiple Jobholding in the U.S. Economy,” by Keith A. Bailey and James R. Spletzer, Working Paper #CES-20-26, September 2020.
So the Census researchers conclude that multiple jobholding is pro-cyclical (no longer just a “make ends meet in hard economic times” phenomenon), has been rising in prevalence over the past 20 years (not even just since the Great Recession), and “is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.” They might as well have said that the role of women in the workforce, and how women choose to work, is more important than we knew.
This prompted me to go back to my summer 2019 blog post and update the data through September 2020 (the latest monthly employment statistics from household survey data) to see what the past year looks like in terms of multiple jobholding and its prevalence among workers overall and men vs. women. Here are some charts that look at multiple jobholding as share of people who are employed, in the workforce (“labor force” meaning employed or unemployed/looking for work), and relative to total population–and then comparing each of the three shares for men vs. women. All charts show BLS unadjusted monthly household employment survey data for populations age 16+, from January 2018 through September 2020:
Shares of total (men+women) population measures: Overall, multiple jobholding dropped dramatically from February to April 2020 at the start of the Pandemic Recession as the number of jobs in the overall economy plummeted, and as of September is still below what had been the “new normal.”As share of total employed, comparing men (blue) vs. women (orange). Note that multiple jobholding in the recovery (thus far) from the Pandemic Recession first rose for both men and women, but since July has decreased among working men while increasing among working women.As share of those in the labor force, we see basically the same story as among those employed; since July, women’s multiple jobholding has increased while men’s has decreased.And even as a share of their total population, women are more likely to be multiple jobholders than are men.
In summary, we see that multiple jobholding has come down and then back up during the pandemic, along with jobs and employment in general. Women still juggle a lot of jobs, whether paid work in the labor market or unpaid work at home. Even as workers have lost some of their multiple jobs and have yet to fully regain them, we see that multiple jobholding is a significant phenomenon in the U.S. economy and one that is not necessarily a bad thing if it has made it easier for workers–especially working women–to better tailor their work opportunities to their personal circumstances and preferences. Women have always chosen multiple part-time jobs so that work fits into the rest of their lives better, even pre-pandemic. With the pandemic placing only more burdens and constraints on women’s time (with kids and elderly parents to care for), multiple jobholding will become an even more important way for women to stay connected to the workforce. But multiple part-time jobs have never added up to the level of economic reward one can get from one full-time job–whether it be in the form of wages or benefits (such as subsidized health insurance, childcare assistance, and paid leave). Women are too easily relegated to “secondary earner” status (read: “you should be the one to stay at home now”) which makes it too common for them to disengage from market work when family circumstances change. The way women juggle their different jobs at home and at work will require a lot more attention and focus from economic policymakers if we want our economy to not just “survive” this pandemic recession but to actually “thrive” over the longer term.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report (for July 2019), which came out on Friday, was kind of “same old, same old”: service-providing jobs (particularly in healthcare) strong, goods-producing jobs weak, the pace of job growth holding steady, the unemployment rate still really low (3.7%), and wages still rising decently. We’re now in the slowest, steadiest economic expansion on record (since June 2009 according to the NBER), and economists are constantly looking for signs we are finally due for a downturn and pondering if the signs we’re used to looking for aren’t so obvious anymore. With our mix of people who are the foundation of our economy, and the things we people (vs. robots and other countries’ people) do, changing all the time, I often wonder how economists can assume that the patterns the U.S. macroeconomy has followed in the past are well-informing our assessments of where we are headed. How can we predict or even recognize what we haven’t really seen before–something that might be called a “new normal” (clearly, an oxymoron).
One way we know that the economy is different from the last expansion, just from living and looking around us, is the changing nature of work. There are more “gig” or independent workers in the economy now compared with the last expansion, facilitated by the development of mobile online labor platforms that have made it possible for people to supplement their incomes from their main or “real” job with the income from being a Lyft or Uber driver, or a Rover dog walker, or a Thumbtack handyman, or a Grubhub restaurant-food deliverer. Technological advancements alone have likely made this economic recovery’s labor market look different from that of the last one–before such “gigs” ever existed.
So I decided to dig a little deeper into the latest jobs report to see what I could see as any evidence that this was not entirely just a “same old, same old” employment report during a typical (but long) economic expansion. It seemed to me that given the rise of alternative forms of work over the past 10 years, we might expect this to show up in the BLS data on workers who hold multiple jobs. An in-depth analysis of the household data on multiple jobholders was published in the BLS’s Monthly Labor Review in April 2015 on data that ran (only) through 2013. The article by Etienne Lale concluded that:
“Multiple jobholding declined in the United States during the past two decades [1994-2013]. Data from the Current Population Survey show that the trend reflects a lower propensity to moonlight among single jobholders. Multiple jobholders, by contrast, did not become more likely to return to single jobholding…
In 2013, 6.8 million workers in the United States held more than one job. Twenty years before, the figure was 7.5 million, although the total number of workers with a job was lower by 15.9 million. The multiple-jobholding rate— the proportion of multiple jobholders among all employed workers—rose from 6.2 percent in 1994 to a high of 6.8 percent during the summer of 1995. It has declined steadily since then and was at 5.0 percent by the end of 2013. Inspection of data from the Current Population Survey…reveals that the downward trend holds across various sociodemographic groups of the working-age population (those 16 to 64 years old).“
The above analysis had indeed picked up an apparent downward long-term (20-year, 1994-2013) trend in the rate of multiple jobholding among all workers, male and female, and across different age groups and educational attainment levels. The historical time series also revealed the short-term blips up in multiple jobholding that happened during the Great Recession which caused a temporary deviation or at least pause in the downward trend. This reminds us that people who hold multiple jobs often do so because they need the extra income or because one job alone (whether part- or full-time) doesn’t pay enough to pay one’s bills. Was the general downward trend from 1994-2013 due to more people having access to better-paying jobs because of long-term (not just cyclical) improvements in the economy–such that at least in non-recessionary times we should see continued declines in multiple jobholding?
I decided to take a quick spin through the most recent data available (through July 2019), to split the women from the men, and to look at multiple jobholding as a share of some broader populations–not just as % of employed (as BLS calculates for us in their report), but as % of the labor force and as % of overall population. The charts below show (really simple) annual averages of the unadjusted monthly data for all years from 2000 through 2019 (with 2019 showing the average of only the first 7 months in the year, which I can think of reasons why that would bias the number upward as well as downward).
Multiple jobholders as % of employed, annual averages of unadjusted (not seasonally-adjusted) monthly numbers, for employed women (age 16+) and employed men (age 16+), from BLS historical tables in the July 2019 employment report (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm).Multiple jobholders as % of labor force, annual averages of unadjusted (not seasonally-adjusted) monthly numbers, for women (age 16+) in the labor force (i.e., employed or unemployed and looking for work) and men (age 16+) in the labor force. Calculated from BLS historical tables in the July 2019 employment report (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm).Multiple jobholders as % of population, annual averages of unadjusted (not seasonally-adjusted) monthly numbers, for women (age 16+) and men (age 16+). Calculated from BLS historical tables in the July 2019 employment report (https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsatabs.htm).
You can see why I titled this post “Women Work A Lot of Jobs”–because the difference between the story for men and the story for women is stark. In the 2015 article cited above, it was already apparent that multiple jobholding was more common for women than for men; since the late 1990s the fraction of employed women working multiple jobs has always exceeded–and increasingly so–the fraction of employed men working multiple jobs. The longer-term downward trend in multiple jobholding that first started in the late 1990s for both women and men appears to have bottomed out after the Great Recession and even started to rise again–a new trend that was hard to spot in the prior analysis that went only through 2013. For women in particular, something about the current economic expansion and whatever the “new normal” might be is causing multiple job holding to be a more common state. As of July 2019, 5.7% of employed women (age 16+) and 5.5% of women in the labor force were multiple jobholders–both the highest monthly shares since 2009 (when the overall unemployment rate hit 10%)! And from the last % of population chart, this says that any woman is now as likely to be a multiple jobholder as any man–regardless of whether they are in the labor market or not! (3.16% of total population for women and 3.25% for men as of July 2019; the chart shows only annual averages.) And that’s multiple jobs in the formal labor market–not even counting all the jobs we do at home before and after “work.”
Why is this happening to women–so differently from men? I can make up several different explanations (below), none of which could be confirmed or rejected without further breakdowns (“crosstabs”) of the data–such as women by age, educational attainment, and marital status–and/or (ideally, and) by conducting survey and focus group research on women vs. men who work multiple jobs and asking them “why?”
They need multiple jobs to add up to the pay of one job. Women are more likely to earn less than men in even a main, full-time job, holding constant their level of human capital (such as holding a Ph.D. in economics), for all the different reasons that could fill up an entire book: career interruptions having children, having more responsibility in caring for (young or old) family members, being less inclined to ask for raises and promotions, as well as outright (unfair) discrimination.
They need multiple jobs because their best single job opportunity would still leave them underemployed. Many women reentering the workforce after raising children may find it hard to get hired into a full-time role after so much time out of the labor market. They may also choose to intentionally signal to employers that they need some flexibility in their schedule to attend to their family when needed. This gives the employer an excuse to underpay and underemploy them. (Women who reveal they are not only mothers but also wives receive the double whammy of signaling that they don’t need a full-time job because they have a spouse to support them. Economists know this result from recent research showing the effects of the birth of a child on a father’s vs. a mother’s earnings.)
They choose to work multiple jobs not because of the money but because of how they want to spend their time and use their talents. I recently got remarried, and it kills me when women say “congratulations, you don’t have to work anymore!” (Men wouldn’t dare say that to me.) I’ve always worked multiple jobs even while having one really good full-time job, because I like doing things other than my main job, and sometimes I even get paid a little for those other things (like teaching economics one evening a week and teaching yoga on Saturday mornings). Did you know that women 55 and over are projected to be the single fastest growing segment of the labor force over the next decade? Many of us have high levels of human capital and have had productive careers thus far, but now that the kids are grown, we have more time and energy and wisdom and can actually work harder in the market economy than ever before–but we can also afford to be choosy about how we work, and often a combination of part-time roles that are customized to our skill sets and talents will be more attractive to us than one full-time, cookie-cutter role (which maybe any old man or younger person could fill).
So the phenomenon of holding more than one job is definitely not a thing of the past. It’s also not a thing that necessarily gets worse/more prevalent during recessionary times, given that its rates as a share of whatever denominator you use–employed, labor force, or total population–are as high now as during the Great Recession. It’s also not easy to blanket-characterize as a bad thing (forced by economic hardship) or a good thing (more opportunities to be productive in more ways). I think it’s a great example of something important happening in our economy which to better understand, we need to do more quantitative and qualitative research on–by analyzing more disaggregated (“granular”) data, and by having conversations with more individual people (those grains in granular!) who I know will have stories to tell, because I do, too.
