Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Was it only yesterday that we were worried about quiet quitters — workers who simply do their jobs, rather than putting in extra unpaid hours?
Today’s anxiety is all about the industriousness of polygamous workers, which describes someone taking on more than one job, also known as double jobbing, or overemployment.
Unlike polygamy (marriage between three or more people), it is undertaken without the consent of the other person in their relationship: their boss. Side hustles, done around the edges of a job, or gig work, involving multiple roles without a main employer, are, by contrast, seen as a sign of a good, honest grinder.
This year, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs disclosed that one of their full-time employees was also on staff at the Department of Health and Social Care. The National Fraud Initiative also published a report on the phenomenon, which they began investigating amid concern in the pandemic that working from home created fertile conditions for cheating on one’s boss. In a pilot in London councils, 23 cases were identified and £500,000 in overpaid salaries unearthed, followed up with a pledge to investigate nationwide.
When I first heard the term, I thought it was just another boring aspect to the much-discussed lives of throuples (those in three-way relationships) or polycules (multiple relationships). Every other month, it seems, some Brooklynite is writing that they saved their marriage by opening it up. Searching for polygamous work on TikTok, I discovered many earnest accounts of the practicalities of making special time for both your husband and girlfriend.
So it was some relief that this was just the latest expression for two-timing your employer. My principal question for polygamous workers, however, is the same as of polygamous relationships. How does anyone have time for this? It seems exhausting. One boss is bad enough; how to manage two, while also concealing your tracks?
One woman on social media explained that she approached the challenge by simply giving both jobs 40 per cent effort — like many of her fellow workers were doing anyway. Perhaps this is better than the alternative. Bore-out, the opposite of burnout, describes when an underemployed worker becomes catatonic with boredom. Others detach entirely from work. Over a decade ago, one US software engineer became so disengaged that he outsourced his job to China for a fifth of his pay, and spent his days browsing cat videos on YouTube.
Some have suggested the way to prevent double-jobbing is to mandate a return to the office. But does every workplace problem have to be solved by a crackdown on working from home? Perhaps it’s also worth considering giving staff productive work, with clear objectives and solid pay.
There is one aspect I do find cheering about polygamous working, however. It is evidence of a thriving culture of neologisms to describe variations on old work patterns.
Gen Z — the cohort born between 1997 and 2012 — did not invent slacking, the term popularised by author Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Polygamous workers, indeed, may well be in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
But across the globe, vigorous debate about the workplace is taking place among young people on social media. According to Bobby Duffy, an expert on generational differences, this has been helped by a “massively changed information environment”, which enables us to share “compelling individual case studies — of people having a breakdown about their 9-5 job”.
In this context new expressions like “quiet quitting” and “task masking” are gaining traction. They are, says writer and lexicographer Tony Thorne, “self-consciously coined and promoted like memes”, designed to go viral. Thorne thinks this suggests the young people using them are not lazy, but “more resistant to accepting traditional notions of work, workplaces and work etiquette”. Perhaps no surprise, given they grew up in the aftermath of Brexit and the pandemic.
Polygamous working may be disloyal. But such a thriving culture of workplace neologisms is surely evidence of thoughtful creativity. This is the kind of thing a boss usually likes — as long as they don’t find out about the other one.
