More workers forced to try moonlighting

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

Moonlighting is back.

No, not that TV series from the 1980s that starred Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.

I mean this: Lynda Nicely, a 28-year-old public relations administrator for a nonprofit in Milwaukee, found it increasingly hard to make ends meet on her $40,000 salary because of escalating gas and food prices. So last month she took on a second job as a cocktail waitress at night.

"I don’t have cable or the Internet, and I’ve cut down everything to the bare minimum. You’d think I’d make enough at my job to pay the bills and catch a Brewers’ game once in a while, but I don’t," she says.

Dave Lattomus, a sous-chef at the DuPont Country Club in Wilmington, Del., despite his good salary recently had to take on a second gig teaching culinary arts at a trade school to cover a second mortgage and child support payments.

"I make pretty decent money," he explains. "If you told me when I was in culinary school in Pittsburgh in 1998 that I’d need a second job even when I made it as a chef after working my way up from line cook, I wouldn’t have believed you."

Moonlighting appears to be back in vogue. But it’s not because people want to expand their job horizons and try new careers. It’s because they need money. Money to deal with recessionary pressures — everything from inflation to fears they may lose their primary jobs.

Another big reason, according to Robert Reich, former labor secretary under the Clinton Administration, is "because wages are falling, adjusted for inflation."

The number of workers in the United States who have a full-time job and also have a part-time job on the side has risen about 5 percent to 4.17 million in 2007 from 3.98 million the prior year, according to Department of Labor statistics.

"We’re starting to see more moonlighting by fear," says Christine Durst, director of research for RatRaceRebellion.com, a work-at-home job-leads site. "We usually see moonlighting by choice."

The movement to get an extra paycheck is often most notable among workers in industries that are struggling.

Mary Kurek, who does a lot of public speaking in the housing industry, and is author of "Who’s Hiding in Your Address Book," has noticed the moonlighting phenomenon among the workers she meets.

"I’ve run into some of those same real estate agents from the workshop bartending at local restaurants," she says. "I know one who drives a limo during ‘down times’ to bring in the extra cash. I know three in the industry who launched into network marketing gigs and another who took a job at a bed-and-bath store to help pay bills."

With housing in the dumps, she says, people fear losing their jobs.  "They are crunching numbers and moonlighting to make ends meet. For many the second job is what keeps them in the first job — the one in which they’ve invested a lot of time and money to get rolling."

Even though there appears to be a growing desire by employees to get a second job, they face an economic conundrum.

During a recession, employers cut back on the number of jobs as they did last month when U.S. firms cut 80,000 positions, according to the Labor Department. That means fewer jobs to go around, says Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com.

"People are much more able to get a second job during an expansion," he notes.

Indeed, Lattomus, the chef from Delaware, hit a brick wall when he tried to find another chef job at a local food establishment even though he has tons of friends and connections in the industry. "I asked other chefs if they had or knew of any part-time work available, but people are just not eating out as much these days so business is quiet," he explains.

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