Multiple jobholding over the past two decades

Abstract

Multiple jobholding has declined in the United States during the past two decades. Data from the Current Population Survey show that the trend reflects a lower propensity to moonlight among single jobholders. Multiple jobholders on the other hand 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 corresponding 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 (CPS) in this article reveals that the downward trend has been common across various sociodemographic groups of the working-age population. This article documents the evolution of multiple jobholding in the United States, shining a light on workers’ transitions into and out of multiple jobholding. These transitions convey information about the propensity of single jobholders to become multiple jobholders and vice versa, which in turn help explain why moonlighting has become less common. Multiple jobholding is relevant to our understanding of the labor market from a variety of perspectives. ∗Address: Department of Economics, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, United Kingdom – Phone: +44(0)117 331 7912 – E-mail: etienne.lale@bristol.ac.uk At the individual level, moonlighting serves both economic and noneconomic purposes, as earlier studies have shown [4, 5]. In May 2004 for instance, most workers who were holding more than one job reported doing so in order to earn extra money (38.1 percent), to meet expenses or to pay off debt (25.6 percent) [3]. Meanwhile, a nonnegligible fraction of multiple jobholders (17.6 percent) reported that their primary motivation was the enjoyment they received from their second job. Multiple jobholding is also important from a macroeconomic perspective because moonlighting adds millions of jobs to the economy, as the aforementioned figures show. In 1995, for example, when the multiple-jobholding rate was at its highest level, multiple jobholders worked an average of 13.5 hours per week on their second job, thereby adding about a 100 million hours worked to the economy each week. Trends in multiple jobholding Figure 1 shows the evolution of the multiplejobholding rate in the population of working-age individuals. As already mentioned, multiple jobholding has been declining throughout almost the entire period examined. Interestingly, earlier studies based on the May supplements of the CPS reported evidence of a rise in multiple jobholding during the 1980s [6, 7]. Therefore, the increase between 1994 and 1995 shown in Figure 1 may well have been the continuation of an earlier trend. During the summer of 1995, however, this trend came to an end and by 2013 the multiple jobholding rate was at a decadal low.