"Earning 1 Billion Won Annually with Three Jobs"… 'Job Juggling' Trend Using Remote Work Spreads in the US

If Not a Professional or Senior Executive
Fewer Places with Moonlighting Prohibition Clauses
Cases of 1 Billion Won for Simultaneous Work at IBM and Meta

Among American office workers, moonlighting known as ‘job juggling’ is spreading like a trend. It is a behavior of earning more money by belonging to multiple companies simultaneously using remote work.

According to Business Insider (BI), a U.S. economic media outlet, on the 1st, Bryan Roque, who was fired from Amazon during the COVID-19 period in 2020, was re-employed by IBM at the end of that year. Later, when he received a job offer from Meta, Roque worked at both companies simultaneously. He told BI, “Besides IBM and Meta, I currently work at Tinder, a dating app operator, and earn a total of $820,000.”

In fact, in the U.S., although it varies by job and state, non-compete clauses are unfamiliar unless you are a professional or senior executive. Large companies such as Google and Meta allow employees to work other jobs during personal time as long as it is unrelated to company work.

(This photo is not directly related to the article.) [Photo source=Pixabay]

California Labor Code Section 96 legally defines ‘moonlighting,’ meaning working at night. It prohibits employers from punishing employees who work other jobs during nighttime (free time).

Occasionally, ‘easy dismissal’ disputes arise when CEOs take issue with moonlighting, but moonlighting has increased further with the expansion of COVID-19 and remote work. If the following conditions are met ? ▲ no conflict of interest with the employer ▲ no use of company resources for other work ▲ no impairment of performance ? it is possible to work full-time at two companies.

In a survey conducted in January by U.S. HR consulting firm Resume Builder on 1,272 remote workers, 79% of respondents answered that they were employed by two or more companies last year.

Some say that job juggling does not necessarily increase workload to the point of overwork. One office worker who is job juggling told BI in an interview, “Sometimes I have to stay up all night when work piles up, but my working hours are about 40 hours a week.”

The online community ‘Overemployed (OE),’ where job juggling workers share know-how, has as many as 300,000 members. However, it is uncertain how long the job juggling trend will continue. Corporate HR managers are aware of the trend and are coming up with countermeasures. In the Resume Builder survey, 69% of employees who moonlight said they were asked to clearly prove resignation from their previous job when joining a new company.