The 海角视频 Government has announced that it plans to put some restrictions on MP’s second jobs, causing working people to wonder how on earth any MP finds time and energy in the day to take on more work - let alone the type of work that can earn £54,000 in just one month like MP and barrister Sir Geoffrey Cox earned in August for legal work as against his basic annual MP salary of £81,932
.Possibly the good people of Torridge and West Devon don’t have a lot of problems they need the help of their MP with. Either that or Mr Cox needs to define more clearly which of his jobs is the second one.
Employment contracts routinely have a provision in them that either prohibits employees from working for another employer or requires that employees must seek consent from their employer to take on a second job. This is often described as a “full time and attention clause.”
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Many working people either need or want to earn extra cash by taking on another job. During my summers as a student, I worked during the day in the City overseeing data inputting for banks and then at 5.30pm rushed across London to start my job at the student union bar.
The not unreasonable response from employees who are prevented by their employers from taking second jobs is that what they do in their own time outside of work shouldn’t concern their employer, so long as it doesn’t affect their day job. And the not unreasonable response from employers is that working two jobs does potentially affect the day job, with employees being less productive if they are not getting enough rest outside of work.
I was certainly not at my best come the end of the week of doing two jobs, but I only had two jobs for a few months in summer. This was before the Working Time Regulations were passed in 1998. The Working Time regulations are about health and safety and employee wellbeing and set a maximum total 48-hour working week.
To work two jobs totalling more working hours than this (even if neither job on its own is for more than 48 hours) would require an employee to opt out of the Working Time Regulations to prevent the employers being in breach.
The pandemic and working from home have added a whole new dimension to second jobs. Many employers and employees learned from the mass working from home experiment that a job need not necessarily be undertaken from 9am to 5pm and that it is possible for employees to successfully mix and match home and work in a far more flexible way than had previously been the norm. So long as the job was getting done as efficiently as it was before, employers became less concerned if employees started work later or broke off at 3pm, picking up work again a little later in the day if needed.
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However, for some employees, working from home out of sight of their managers has apparently allowed them to take on a second secret job, working at the same time as their first job, flipping between two laptops. This is known as being overemployed, thanks in part to American based website overemployed.com. The site gives working people tips on how to manage two jobs including 12 rules to do it successfully, the first (and 12th) of which is don’t talk about having two jobs.
Other rules include not getting attached to your second job such that you actually care what your colleagues think of you and being average so people don’t remember you and stumble upon a common connection to your other job. The whole purpose of being overemployed (which is not the same as being overworked according to the site) is to make more salary, not become employee of the month or secure promotions.
Bearing in mind the first rule of the 'overemployed club' is not to talk about the overemployed club, there is currently no data on how many 海角视频-based employees are working in this way. The American tax system is based on employees reporting their own tax rather than employers deducting tax at source as happens under the 海角视频 system and an extra job would impact on an employee’s tax code here which might cause the first employer to ask questions.
If the employment contract does contain a provision prohibiting working elsewhere the second job could lead to dismissal from the first job, particularly if the second job is for a competitor as contracts also often contain provisions about not working in competition during employment or for a period afterwards.
Probably the biggest hurdle to being overemployed is staff monitoring. According to the trade union Prospect, there has been a marked increase in remote employees being monitored by employers, using surveillance technologies including software that tracks keyboard strokes but also camera technology. Prospect is calling for the introduction of new measures to protect employee privacy and in August the Information Commissioner’s Office opened a consultation.
MP’s can’t keep to the first (and 12th) rule of overemployed club by not talking about their second jobs. They must disclose any additional income including gifts and donations in the register of members’ interests, which is updated every two weeks. However, until their contracts come with a full time and attention clause, they are currently free to be overemployed if they so choose.
- Bethan Darwin is a partner with law firm Thompson Darwin.