Multi-jobbers, pay gaps and the hipster index

Afternoon all,

Half the government seems to have quit (we’re on to people you’ve never heard of) and Labour MPs are getting in on the act. But MPs aren’t the only ones shedding jobs – this week’s reading brings confirmation that the idea ever more people are doing two or three jobs is a myth. In fact fewer of us are. Part of the explanation might be found in another bit of reading – which shows that the view that working long long hours is the key to getting promoted is anything but a myth. You’re not exactly going to pick up a second job if you can’t get out of the first one until the sun has set…. We also bring news of which cities to avoid if you (like the rest of the world) could do without a hipster in your face.

In more positive news, the schools have started breaking up and the zoo that is the House of Commons in 2018 enters recess next week – so hold on people. Summer, and hopefully sanity, is nearly here.

Enjoy the reading,

Torsten

Director
Resolution Foundation

One job to rule them all. ‘Everyone is working two or three jobs’ is something you hear all the time. Lots of people are at it apparently – not just those who actually have to do multiple jobs to make ends meet, but also all of us jumping on the technology bandwagon to get a gig on the side. Except we’re not. That’s the finding in a short report this week from the US. 4.9 percent of Americans are multi-jobbing, down from over 6 per cent in the mid-90s. Those numbers mirror the trends we found for the UK a while back – 1.1 million people were working multiple jobs (including self-employment) but the proportion of workers doing so (3.6 per cent) was at a record low, having peaked at around 5 per cent in the mid-1990s. So it turns out Britpop, not grime, was the multi-jobbing soundtrack.

Putting in the hours. We’re all used to good TV and design coming out of Denmark – but it’s not all good news. A new paper looking at the careers of Danish workers finds what we’ve all feared – that being stuck to your desk or on the shop floor for hour after hour is the key to getting promoted. Just to make you even more depressed – it also helps you get on if you accept anti-social hours. Lucky none of us have kids/friends/lives to live….

The hipster index. An international index seeks to answer the big question of our age: ‘What’s the most hipster city in the world?’. This is a very serious exercise, combining five variables – the number of vegan food outlets, coffee shops, tattoo parlours, vintage shops and record stores. Across 446 cities in 20 countries they had 2,834 record shops, 7,772 vegan restaurants, 14,588 tattoo parlours, 15,549 vintage shops and 93,203 coffee shops to consider. And the winner is… Brighton, which narrowly pipped Portland, Oregon to the post. And before everyone starts giggling about the hippies down on the south coast, don’t forget that the second UK city on this index of doom was…. Manchester. This should remind us all that there is such a thing as too many big beards.

A tale of two cities. It’s not news that in the 21^st Century cities drive growth in most of the world – that’s a lived experience, whether you live in one and face surging housing costs or don’t and find that getting access to the same job opportunities can be tough. But a new report puts the scale of this trend into stark perspective: between 2014 and 2016 the world’s biggest 300 cities drove 67 per cent of global economic growth. They did that while delivering 36 per cent of global employment growth (spelling out the concentration of productivity in these cities) and, more worryingly, with only 21.9 per cent of global population growth… Place, as always, matters.

The times they are a-changin’. When progress is made it’s good to dwell on it, especially as there’s not much of it around at present. A ‘letter from London’ in the latest issue of the New Yorker tells the story of Carrie Gracie’s campaign, alongside many other women at the BBC, for equal pay for women at the corporation. It was a year ago exactly that the first list of the BBC’s highest-paid employees went public, prompting a national campaign and much hand wringing within the BBC. Obviously the BBC is not a typical employer, and we shouldn’t forget that far less attention gets paid to the fact that women do far more than their share of low paid work. But we should celebrate the UK’s progress on exposing gender pay gaps, which the article contrasts with that of some other countries – you won’t be massively surprised that in Trump’s America things have been going, if anything, backwards…

This week’s chart… is a reminder that the high profile public debate about the gender pay gap has not been matched by a focus on the disadvantage and discrimination faced by many ethnic minority workers in the labour market. Unlike gender there is no legal requirement to public pay gaps by ethnicity (although good on ITN – or ITV/Ch4/Ch5 news as everyone else knows them – this week for publishing how much less BAME staff get paid than their white colleagues. Obviously less good on them for actually paying the typical black, Asian or other minority ethnic background worker 20 per cent less in the first place, but it’s a start on a complex issue.) Across the UK we have seen significant progress in employment and qualification levels for ethnic minority groups, but as this week’s chart shows, too often this has still left them earning far less than white men and women. And in the case of black men, the pay gap has actually grown…. If you want to learn more you can read our new report published this week – or if you’ve had enough reading for one weekend, listen to a new RF podcast featuring David Lammy MP.