After the Bell: Everyone’s doing the side-hustle shuffle — just don’t hide your job-juggling

This is the time of year when Gauteng’s birds are singing slightly earlier, the cats are more interested in the morning, and the dogs start the day hungry.

And there is an explosion of outside musical events to attend.

I was lucky enough, through having the good sense to have wonderful teenagers and long-suffering friends, to end up at not one but two of those over the weekend, giving me a certain lightness for much of today.

A good live musical experience, showcasing all our country has to offer, can keep you cheerful long past the first meeting of the morning.

On the way home from one of those events on Saturday evening, as one does, I fell into conversation with the Uber driver.

I was able to avoid the “where are you from” chat and move immediately to whether he has another job.

Sure enough, he was happy to tell me he worked a nine-to-five job during the week and drove on weekends.

Never mind AI and the virtual world, one of the biggest work trends in the past 20 years is having more than one job.

I should tell you at this point that I’m one of them.

When I started, in radio journalism, it was literally one job, one notebook and one cellphone (in those more innocent days it had no camera).

Now so many people in journalism, in almost all fields, rush from job to job, doing a variety of bewildering things.

You can manipulate numbers and words and images and information so productively so quickly now, you can do so much more in the day than you did in the Nineties.

In return, our remuneration for that output obviously goes down because it’s cheaper to do.

But corporations – rightly, I think – do hold out against this change.

For many management positions, maybe nearly all of them, you have to be full time, by which I do mean full time and not “full time” with them. You can’t actually go and do something else.

Clearly, some people don’t believe that.

Business Day had a pretty wild story this morning about Sibongiseni Thotsejane, who has now been ordered to pay back about R2.9-million she was paid by the V&A Waterfront.

She was working full time at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology while also working full time at the V&A.

Thotsejane had a top job at the latter too – chief information officer – which I’m sure takes up quite a bit of time every day.

There’s a wonderful detail in the story: owing to her absenteeism, her boss at CPUT, the former acting dean of her department, made her report to him every day so he could see with his own eyes that she was there.

Meanwhile, she was always absent from her other job at the V&A.

What really sank her was that she had lied numerous times, including about how she had left previous jobs (partly for illegally possessing company property) and, surprise surprise, by claiming she was ill when she wasn’t.

Eventually, the V&A went through her company-issued laptop and found she had said she was sick while working at CPUT, among other things (including running a DJ business).

They realised her definition of full-time was really “full time” and not what they meant by the phrase.

One wonders: had she just worked at her jobs diligently, would she have been able to manage her time well enough to do both and do them just well enough to get away with it?

Instead, she lied, and no employer can accept that.

And this is really the nub of the issue: most employers probably want us to do only one thing but have accepted that this is not how the world works anymore. And so long as they know what else it is that you do, or that it’s not a direct conflict (and the definition of “direct” can get very sticky), they will accept it.

From the outside, to see that someone else has one or two or three or four jobs must be incredibly galling.

You would immediately think that one person with their multiple jobs is stopping you from doing one of them.

You end up with less and they end up with more as a result. It might even be a function of our “insiders and outsiders” economy, where those on the outside are not able to get inside.

Employers don’t see it like that at all. They see someone as able to do one job and thus better able to do another.

Certainly, I always think it’s easier to get a job if you already have one, even if it’s not in the same field that you ultimately want to work in.

And of course, if you’re able to work a little bit it also gives you some working capital.

Which is how my Uber driver was able to buy his car and start to drive on weekends to make more money.

I wouldn’t be surprised to bump into him again, doing yet something else.