Employing the Over-Employed
photo by Kate Townsend
How many people that you know would you say are “healthily” employed?
Unemployment rates are typically the percentage rates that we pay attention to, the numbers we want to see decrease year-over-year, month-over-month on every level—country-wide, state-wide, county-wide. There’s no argument that focused efforts shouldn’t continue to lower that number. Obviously, the more folks who are “healthily” employed not only stimulates our overall country’s economy, but also on an even more important local level that of communities and neighborhoods.
“Healthily” is not a word that is often paired with anything to do with the employment and jobs sector and as a Marketer, I’ll admit it doesn’t roll of the tongue quite, you hear terms like a “healthy” economy/outlook, a “thriving” industry, and closer but still not what I define being “healthily employed” is the “work/life” balance realm.
Being “healthily employed” really has little to do with the percentages that we see from the United States Department of Labor on the unemployed (mind you, these are ONLY the number of unemployed who can claim unemployment benefits) such as this week’s download that included the following statement:
What this focus on the unemployed, again not an issue that should be ignored, doesn’t ever really mention is the epidemic of the “OVER-EMPLOYED”.
To me the definition of being “healthily employed” has little to do on whether you love your job, the stress-levels associated with it, your boss, your morning commute—those are all contributors to your mental/physical health. Being “healthily employed” goes beyond all of those things to address a larger problem that many of us do not necessarily even view as a problem, that of the % of the population that is over employed and still can’t make ends meet. Being healthily employed would mean that you could have ONLY one job through which you could pay all of your bills and expenses including: rent, groceries, gas/public transportation, medical, etc.
This is not the case for many, many Americans.
Many of us in the larger, thriving cities also see a “gig society” as a form of this over-employment. In example, graphic designers and developers typically juggle more than one project at a time. However, beyond the glossy shiny polished profiles on LinkedIn, there are just as many if not two or three times as many over-employed individuals as the numbers reported in the unemployment reports.
You know these over-employed individuals as the person who takes your order at a restaurant, your Uber or Lyft driver, your pizza delivery person, the sales associate at your favorite trendy boutique, the receptionist at your local vet, your clerk at a gas station, your bank teller, or the cashier at your neighborhood flower shop. Sometimes two or three of those “personas” are actually the same “over-employed” person. A person who works two to three $10-$15p/hr (or even less as minimum wage in Texas is still at a soul-crushing $7.25 in comparison to the $11.00 in California—neither of which come close to being a livable wage) jobs to sustain a “barely-making-ends-meet” lifestyle.
The food service and hospitality industry is one of the largest purveyors of this epidemic, but it is also a side-effect of the unavoidable operating costs and fluctuation of demand. While many of these 2-3 job jugglers may have great work ethics and hustle non-stop to manage all of their sources of income, burnout is inevitable.
The side-effects for cities who foster and rely on the notion of over-employment can in the end be the debilitating achilles heel in their sustainability models for thriving businesses and local economies. If three local businesses are relying on one employee to perform at optimal levels for each of them, one or more of those local businesses is sure to suffer when that one employee faces burnout or worse is either poached by yet another local business or finds a higher-paying job on their own, leaving those other employees to start the same cycle over and over again with more “over-employed staffers”
After reading one of the lead-in sentences on an article that “reported closing of 52 restaurants, bars, and grocers in Austin alone last year by the Community Impact Newspaper I was certain this over-employment trend was partially if not significantly to blame for a good percentage of these shutterings.
I was not incorrect. Later in the article, this statement appeared citing not only higher rents and property taxes as part of the issue, but also the impact of lower unemployment rates as a factor.
“Other contributing factors include a tightening labor market—Austin’s unemployment rate was 2.7 percent percent in November 2018, the most recent month for which data is available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and increased competition.
What this tightening of the labor market creates is competition for employees, especially in this industry where part-time workers are essential to the success of a business. However, what this article also doesn’t dive into is of those now employed previously unemployed persons how many of those currently have more than one or two jobs as I dove into above.
This is something that I myself am currently witnessing first-hand as having had to staff a new restaurant recently and noticing that approximately 90% of folks that I interviewed for certain roles all had at minimum one other job that they hoped to keep in conjunction with the role that we were offering.
The Nourish Foundation works to help train and place members of the community in the workforce at livable wage positions, but to truly make a larger impact there needs to be a restructuring at a broader level not only in Austin but in Hospitality and Service Industries nation wide and the OVER-EMPLOYMENT trend should also be analyzed as much as the unemployment ones are.