It's Not AI. It's Policy.
9.3 million Americans now work more than one job. That's the highest count the Bureau of Labor Statistics has recorded since it started tracking in 1994. The headlines have a tidy explanation ready: AI freed everyone up, so now they're quietly running five jobs from one laptop.
I went on Hello Future with Kevin Cirilli this week to push back on that.
I'm bullish on AI. I think it's a multiplier, and a good one. But we keep handing it credit, and blame, that belongs somewhere else. The overemployment boom is a policy story wearing an AI costume.
Start with who's doing it and why. When 80% of workers say a second full-time job is their private unemployment insurance, that isn't love of the grind. That's people building a hedge because one paycheck stopped covering the life it used to. And for millennials, none of this is new. Multiple jobs are the operating system we built. When Kevin and I came up in DC in 2008, everyone we knew worked two. The difference is that we're the first generation that never got to leave work at the office, so the second job slid from side hustle to security blanket.
The part the coverage skips is who absorbs the squeeze. The return-to-office push, led by the federal government, is rolling back the workforce gains women made during COVID. Mothers of kids under five came back to work when they could do it from home. Since the RTO mandates, those numbers have slid. Last year, men entered the workforce at three times the rate of women. That's not a chatbot. That's childcare costs, office mandates, and how Washington treats working families, which is to say, not at all.
And if you manage people and the trend makes you nervous, here's the hard truth. You've lost the standing to police hours. Non-competes used to protect your claim on someone's time. They don't anymore. The only fair test left is whether the work gets done. If it does, the second job isn't your call.
This is the whole reason I built The Tradeoff. The financial headline is rarely the real story. The real story is usually a policy choice nobody connected to your life. Overemployment is just the latest one.
The Tradeoff is on a summer hiatus, so for this week’s breakdown of economic headlines, catch up with my guest spots on Hello Future with Kevin Cirilli.