Job postings are down and graduates are struggling, and in a city where one wage does not cover the rent the side hustle has stopped being optional

The Second Job in London

On Tuesday evenings and all day Saturday I work in a bookshop in Hackney. It is not my job. My job is in the communications office of a housing charity, Monday to Friday. The bookshop is what makes the month add up.

I used to think of it as temporary. I have been there three years.

I mention it because I conducted a small survey at a birthday in a pub last week. Eleven people round a table, all aged between twenty-six and thirty-five, all with what their parents would call proper jobs. I asked who had a second source of income.

Nine hands went up.

The Table

A teacher who tutors four evenings a week. A nurse who does agency shifts on her days off. A graphic designer who sells prints online. A civil servant who delivers for a food app on a bicycle. A junior architect who waits tables at weekends. A trainee solicitor who marks exam papers. Two people who rent out a spare room, one of them the room they should be sleeping in. And me, with the books.

The two without were a software engineer and a man whose parents bought him his flat.

This is not a scientific sample. But I do not think my friends are unusual.

Why

The sum is not complicated. I did it in public last spring: what is left from a salary in the mid-thirties once London rent has gone.

The answer was: not enough to save, and barely enough to live. A second income of even three or four hundred pounds a month is the difference between treading water and getting anywhere.

My bookshop money is, in its entirety, what goes into the savings account for a deposit. Without it I would save nothing.

The News That Worries Me

Which is why some recent figures gave me a chill.

A daily business bulletin in August reported that job vacancies remain well below pre-pandemic levels, and that job postings have declined sharply, with graduate and summer vacancies particularly weak. It also said that small business confidence was at its lowest in twelve years.

A newer survey says things have not improved. A report on 1 October found confidence among smaller firms falling sharply, with owners bracing for tax rises in the Budget.

Now think about where second jobs come from. Bars. Shops. Restaurants. Cafes. Small firms that need someone for a Saturday.

Those are exactly the businesses that are not hiring. Separate figures this autumn showed retail and hospitality shedding tens of thousands of jobs between them over two years.

So the squeeze comes from both sides. People need a second job more than ever, and there are fewer to be had.

My bookshop has not replaced the last two people who left. There used to be four of us on a Saturday. There are two.

The Graduate End

The weak graduate market feeds into this in a way that took me a while to see.

My cousin finished her degree in the summer. She cannot find a graduate job, so she is working in a coffee shop. Which is the job that a student, or someone like me looking for extra hours, would otherwise have had.

Everyone is shuffled down one. The graduate takes the barista shift. The person who needed the barista shift takes the delivery app. The delivery app has no bottom.

What Kind of Second Job

From my table of nine, there seem to be three sorts.

The first uses your actual skill. The teacher tutoring, the designer selling prints, the nurse on agency. These pay best per hour, and you are building on something. The risk is that it is more of the same work, and you burn out.

The second is a shift. The bookshop, the waiting tables. Fixed hours, modest pay, and, in my case, the considerable benefit of doing something with my hands in a room full of people after a week at a screen. The cost is that you never have a whole weekend.

The third is the app. Delivering, driving, odd jobs. You can start tomorrow and work when you like. You are also paid by the task, have no sick pay, supply your own bicycle and can be switched off without explanation. My civil servant friend reckons he clears about nine pounds an hour once he has paid for his own repairs. In the rain it is less.

Things Nobody Tells You

Tax. A second income is taxed. If it is a second employment, the code on it will probably take a fifth from the first pound, because your tax-free allowance is used up on the main job. If it is self-employment above a small threshold, you must register and fill in a return. I know two people who found this out by letter.

Your contract. Some employers require permission for outside work. Check before, not after.

The hours. There are legal limits on the working week, and your body has stricter ones. I worked sixty hours a week for most of last winter and was ill in February for a fortnight, which cost me more than I had earned.

The trap. A second job makes an unaffordable life just about affordable, and so you carry on with it. If I did not have the bookshop, I might have asked harder questions about my main salary, or about London.

Two Views

There is a cheerful way to describe all this. A generation of enterprising young people with multiple income streams, building skills, taking nothing for granted. Some of my friends do see it like that. The designer loves her print shop and would do it for nothing.

There is a less cheerful way. People with degrees and full-time professional jobs cannot afford to live in the city where those jobs are, and so they work evenings and weekends as well. That used to be what it meant to be poor. Now it is what it means to be a teacher.

I hold both views, usually on alternate days.

What I Would Say to Someone Starting

If you need the money, there is no shame in it. Almost everyone is doing it and nobody talks about it.

Pick something that gives you more than money if you can. Company, exercise, a skill, free coffee.

Keep one whole day a week with nothing in it.

Put the second income somewhere separate, with a purpose. Otherwise it disappears into the general fog and you are working sixty hours for the same life.

And every so often, ask whether the first job should be paying you more.

The London Prat has thoughts about the modern working week and airs them in its English satirical news on second jobs and its UK satirical news about side hustles. Bohiney Magazine covers a country where they have three and call it freedom.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/