‘Polyworking’—A New Term for a Very Bad (and Old) Thing

When I was still teaching at a state university in Georgia, one of the most alarming developments I noticed was the rise in the number of overwhelmed and exhausted students who were trying to balance multiple low-paying, part-time jobs just to make ends meet. While early in my career, some of my students might have worked night shifts at Wal-Mart or a gas station and taken classes during the day, by the end of my 15 years of teaching, students were waitressing several nights a week, stocking shelves at another grocery store, and picking up a Starbucks shift in-between. The shift at the university where I taught to mostly online offerings was both driven by this trend and, in turn, fed the vicious cycle. The informal promise was that students could work 60 hours a week (as some students did) and still take 15 credits a semester. 

Spoiler alert: This often ended in a spectacular flameout. Many students who opted for this route never finished college—my institution’s six-year graduation rate was below 40 percent. The four-year graduation rate was hovering around 18 percent. It doesn’t require any research to realize that it is well-nigh impossible for even the most talented individual to work 60 hours a week (including, often, night shifts—thereby foregoing sleep) and take a full courseload of demanding college classes on top of it. Oh, and add in family obligations for many of these students, too. 

And so, I was underwhelmed by William Aruda’s recent Forbes column where he actively attempted to sell his readers 'polyworking' as a new and exciting trend. Aruda writes:

Polyworking is a growing trend of managing multiple concurrent jobs rather than relying on a single source of income. It heralds a new phase in what has been known as the "portfolio career" or the practice of "slashers"—a concept introduced by Marci Alboher in her book, "One Person, Multiple Careers." Polyworking can have a major impact on your brand and is one of 9 personal branding trends for 2024. Polyworking is not rare. “Almost half (46%) of workers are polyworking with a side hustle or additional job, and a further 36% plan on starting one in the future,” according to Owl Labs.

Aruda presents this as a positive development—a way to make more money and avoid burnout. Besides, he rightly notes, most people today do not spend a lifetime in the same career, so being nimble and well-networked is a good strategy. You just never know when you might get laid off and need to find another job fast. Even so, while most of the reasons Aruda presents are accurate, they are nothing to celebrate. 

Money, of course, is the foremost reason why so many individuals opt to pick up a second job on top of their first one. Instead of thinking of this as a great move, though, let’s acknowledge it for what it is: It is highly alarming that increasingly, professionals today cannot afford to live on their salaries. This includes quite a few teachers. I knew a high school teacher who had to take on a second job at Walgreens, just to be able to make ends meet. Another high school teacher ended up renting an apartment with a roommate, who was also a teacher. Neither one could afford the rent on his own.  

Having to take on a second job—and work more than 40 hours a week just to pay the bills—is not a positive for our society. Today, we are working more hours than our parents and grandparents, and it comes at the expense of family time. Tim Carney calls this our religion of “workism,” but it could just as well be “polyworkism.” It devours us, body and soul. This is a path away from—not towards—human flourishing.

For those who want to build a meaningful life with family, especially young adults, polyworking is not a goal to strive toward but a foe of genuine flourishing.

It is also naïve to present the idea of taking on an extra job as a way of avoiding burnout. There is something terribly wrong with this notion of fixing dissatisfaction with one’s 40-hours-per-week job by working another 10 to 20 hours elsewhere. Besides, this philosophy presents work explicitly as the number one priority in a person’s life—if we are what we do the most hours (and that is how both spiritual and character formation happens), then someone who works 60 out of the 168 hours total in a week is formed, body and soul, mostly by work, rather than by anything or anyone else.

Lest I seem overly harsh here, I agree with Aruda that this way of diversifying allows for networking, which can lead to future job openings. And yet, the entire idea of polyworking is clearly constructed with the top echelon of corporate workers in mind, but it ignores the vast majority of American workers, who may be more like my former students. Networking is rarely the reason someone picks up an extra job at McDonalds.

Instead of celebrating polyworking, what a family-friendly society requires is the existence of jobs that would allow a young adult professional to support himself or herself on a single salary. Ideally, we need more jobs that would allow one to support a family on that income. Do such jobs exist anymore? The answer is yes, but the calculus involves not just the job itself, but also the location—because (as every real estate agent will tell you), “location, location, location” determines the cost of housing. At the same time, in some jobs, the salary is pretty much the same, regardless of location. Most college professors earn a salary in the same general range, whether they live in rural Georgia or in LA. The cost of living, needless to say, differs dramatically.

And so, what my husband and I found was that it took moving to a small town in the Midwest to find a family-friendly haven for us—a place where we could afford to live on one academic salary. Perhaps we’re not making “our brand shine online” (to borrow Aruda’s terms), but that is precisely the point. We are first and foremost a family. Because of our mindful choices, we are able to homeschool and prioritize time together as a family, with friends, and with our church. 

Ultimately, that is the final critique I have about polyworking. Fundamentally, it is isolating, as it presents the worker as building individual hustles to create her own brand. But people are not products or a “brand” to build. Yes, the state of the economy is stressful. But time with family is still priceless, a treasure on which one cannot put a number. Years with kids really do fly in the blink of an eye, and woe to the parents who willingly missed them just to build a more extensive work portfolio. And so, for those who want to build a meaningful life with family, especially young adults, polyworking is not a goal to strive toward, but a foe of genuine flourishing. 

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Managing Editor for Current, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.