If an employee works two jobs, is he really stealing your business?
I don't think so, but apparently Canopy CEO Davis Bell does.
Bell, whose business is a Utah-based midsize accounting firm management software company, wrote on LinkedIn that it had recently "fired two newly hired engineers who never left their last job in a big tech company. The reason? It's not about It's about people working two synchronous full-time jobs and lying about it - trying to be in two meetings at once, etc. to go out muy rápido."
Very good, so far. I don't care why someone's performance is terrible: if they can't get the job done, after trying to level up, they're out. If someone lies to me, that's ancient history. But, and this is where Bell and I race on separate tracks, if someone can do my job while doing other work, that's fine with me.
Seriously.
As I've been saying for a while, it's not just my opinion that shorter workweeks and working from home contribute to productivity. The proof is there. And, if someone can successfully hold down two jobs, more power to them.
According to Bell, there are "fundamental moral issues at play: 'working' two full-time jobs is stealing, and it also involves a lot of lying and deceit." Is that the case? In this case, no one was stealing. What I would fire them for would be for lying and failing at work.
I mean, Bell, himself, works two jobs. He is a CEO and angel investor in 11 different companies over the last six years. If he does his "his job" justice, he definitely works two full-time jobs. I don't see anyone saying that he is stealing their business.
Also isn't anyone saying that Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, and soon, possibly Twitter as well, is "stealing" their shareholders?
Bell believes this tendency for people to hold two full-time jobs is "a new form of theft and deceit and not something an honest, ethical person would participate in."
I do not agree. I know a lot of people who have two full-time jobs and side jobs. It's called surviving. You see, not everyone works multiple jobs to make money. Many workers do it because they have no choice. They do it because they are struggling and need income.
According to the US Census, long before COVID-19 changed the way we work, 8,3% of workers, or 13 million, held more than one job. Their number has increased. And even if they work to the bone, they earn less than people with good full-time jobs. A Pew Research Center report, The State of Gig Work in 2021, showed that many people rely on notoriously low-paying jobs to make ends meet.
Of course, the attention this issue is getting today is not about people who have one job at McDonald's and another at Wal-Mart. Unless you live in Silicon Valley or some other high-tech, high-cost area, software engineers don't have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. Instead, they take the opportunity to make as much money as possible while the profits are good.
You see, despite all the headlines about FAANG and other big companies laying off workers, the truth is that tech unemployment is only 2,1%. And, for the first time in 17 years, the median salary for technicians broke the six-figure barrier.
Yet today's workers are concerned. The pandemic has shown many of them that there is no guarantee that just because you have a job today, you will have it tomorrow. Many companies have also shown for years that they have no loyalty to their employees.
Sure, there are plenty of tech jobs out there, but will your job still be around by the end of the month? For 44,000 tech workers so far in 2022, according to Crunchbase, the answer was no. In tough times, too many companies have also been willing to cut benefits like 401K contributions, let alone the disaster that is health insurance.
At the same time, having two jobs is not illegal. No labor cop will arrest you for this. In fact, as poor people know, working two jobs is sometimes the best thing to do. Of course, you can be fired for this. In the United States, almost all companies employ you "at will", which means that your employment can be terminated at any time for any reason,
However, no matter how much you earn, inflation is likely to reduce your salary. According to Bluecrew, a job-as-a-service platform, nearly 70% of Americans are now looking for additional work to combat inflation.
As a result, more people than ever have two or more jobs. In fact, according to the St. Louis Fed, almost 5% of employees, or 440 people, have multiple full-time jobs.
Instead of getting mad at people who can juggle that kind of workload, I'm sorry that so many people have decided to do it. Sites like OverEmployed give the impression that having two jobs is a good thing. That's not.
You do what you have to do, which may mean working two well-paying jobs. But overwork is overwork, and the workaholic is unhealthy.
And it's not criminal. As "Washington Post" columnist Karla L. Miller said, quoting a Reddit writer: "It's long been accepted that people work two or three low-paying jobs or gigs just to survive, but soon we'll be talking about getting two." real wages, having secondary insurance, having twice the capacity to save for retirement, it becomes a huge ethical problem! »
Miller summarizes this as "it seems that the main objection to overemployment is not that people work multiple jobs to earn more, but that they do so without killing themselves on the job in the process."
Yes, that's the catch. While I have no problem with people working multiple jobs if they can get by, there is a bigger problem behind this new trend. In Japan, it was called karoshi. It literally means working to death. That is my real concern, not someone "stealing" my business.
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