Polyworking for fun work and profit

Elizabeth Lazarowitz, Don’t Call It a Side Hustle. These Americans Are ‘Polyworking.’ NYTimes, May 30, 2025.

For a growing number of Americans, juggling more than one job, or “polyworking,” has become just another day at the office.

The number of people with multiple full- or part-time jobs climbed to over 8.9 million in March for the first time since 1994, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the phenomenon, before ticking down slightly in April.

As a practice, it’s not so new. Think “moonlighting.”

But as a term, polyworking (and the similar “polyemployment”) is more recent. It began cropping up in human resources research and in traditional and social media after the Covid-19 pandemic as an upbeat spin on millennial workers’ reputation for taking on side hustles, trying to monetize hobbies and eschewing 9-to-5 work.

“It’s a way to take back ownership of work and one’s career in a meaningful way, pushing back against the sense that you are identified by one job, one employer,” said Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies the labor market.

But she added it also candy-coats the biggest reason many people do it: They have to. “There is an element of gloss to it that minimizes the hardship and economic need that forces them to cobble together a variety of subpar jobs,” Professor Hatton said.

The final paragraphs:

“The way the economy’s going, you can’t live off of one job, even two jobs sometimes,” said Marcel Wizzard, 25, who lives in Hackensack, N.J., with his parents. Aiming to pay off his credit card debt, he clocks 40-hour weeks as an Amazon delivery worker and after his shifts end, he hops in his car to deliver food to Uber Eats customers.

Clouding the economic outlook is a staggering number of government layoffs, a trade war set off by the Trump administration’s tariffs and a volatile stock market.

“We are in a moment of pretty intense turmoil economically, politically and culturally,” Professor Hatton said. It is, she said, “creating a fair amount of economic anxiety, if not real hardship, so that would go a long way to explaining the drive to find extra work.”

There's more at the link.