The Great British Flog-Off
The Great British Flog-Off
Is this the real reason we've avoided recession up until now?
Who are the biggest earners from sofa hopping app AirBnB? Believe it or not, it’s older women; landladies and homeowners enjoying their five star ratings and super-host status, all the while adding to the rental crisis in major cities across the world.
Women currently make up 55% of the global host community and 62% in the UK, with female hosts earning on average £6,600 per annum in 2022 (more than men). Proof then, if you needed it, that in today’s economy it's not just the tech-savvy youngsters who are mastering the art of the side hustle; it's becoming a norm across all ages.
I’d love to know, although it will probably be impossible to find out, the extent to which side hustle revenue has helped us avoid economic meltdown the last couple of years - with heating bills, food costs and everything else rising. New data comes close to the answer, suggesting that a side gig could bring in more than a worker earning the UK Living Wage. Research from website builder GoDaddy shows that the average moonlighter earns £22,900 a year in additional income (around £1,600 more than someone working 37.5 hours a week on the Living Wage).
As we grapple with soaring bills and uncertain times, these additional revenue streams have gone beyond a trend and become a necessity. But nor is it a particularly new idea. In previous eras, when work came with more uncertainty and few legislative protections, multiple streams of revenue were the norm amongst the non-professional classes, especially for women. My own grandma, a talented seamstress, always had some extra work lined up on top of her cleaning job.
The key difference today is not the ease (the digital community has only replaced the informality of our geographic community) but the variation and speed of side-hustling. Crucially, too, this culture has infiltrated the professional classes. Indeed, it incorporates such a range of activities as to arguably render the name itself flabby and meaningless. It’s the divorcee on Facebook marketplace selling her secondhand wedding dress. It’s the teenager on Depop selling box fresh marked up trainers. It’s the masters student funding their studies doing on-line tutoring to anxious GCSE students. It’s the TikTok video masters selling penny sweets via livestreams. In the UK, it has been estimated by next year almost half of UK adults could be banking on a side gig. It is no wonder that the government introduced legislation to tax all this additional income. Now if you earn more than £1,000 a year online, sellers must register as self-employed and file a self-assessment tax return at the end of the financial year.
So if you now need to declare it to HMRC, should you also need to declare it to your boss? Because what is increasingly an opportunity for the Treasury will also become more of a headache for employers. Since the pandemic, when a lot of these hustles got off the ground, and hybrid work became the norm, many workers have learned to seamlessly juggle these side gigs with their regular jobs. And to the ire of employers. One case saw an employee win £22,000 after being advised by her boss at Halifax Bank of Scotland not to promote her cake-making ‘side hustle’ on social media while on long-term sickness leave. Yet, this is an exception. Most side hustles don’t conflict with primary jobs and often lead to happier, more financially secure employees.
Imagine Sarah, whose 9-5 is as a graphic designer, but whose 5-9 is as an Etsy jewellery maker. Harmless, you might say. But her Etsy shop isn’t just a hobby; it's a crucial part of her income, helping her keep up with rising living costs and is the real reason she hasn’t left her company for a higher wage which she knows she could command elsewhere. Hybrid working works for her as it means she can make regular trips to the Post Office to send off orders, and while she doesn’t work on her side hustle in office hours, she does use their laptop, design software and admittedly most of her creative energy on growing her own business. And it does contribute to her ongoing sense of burnout.
Imagine Tom, a young consultant who built a successful YouTube gaming channel which funded him through university, and now he is working he continues to spend his spare time filming content. He spent some of the pandemic filming when he should have been logged on but now he goes into the office five days a week and is filming out of office hours or on a Saturday. Becoming a successful YouTuber means that he has built a bank of skills but they aren’t ones he deploys in his current job, though he knows they will come into play one day. Consultancy will never be his passion, like YouTube, and he has a slightly detached relationship with the company and his profession as a result.
The point is that these side hustles are fundamentally reordering the way professionals see their career and its income. The culture of the side hustle is, in essence, challenging the one-salary model, the long-career model and the fixed identification as a employee. That should be of concern to any business owner, manager or employer.
Free marketeers may salivate at all this perceived entrepreneurial activity and like to talk about the ‘unleashing of the entrepreneurial spirit’ as if it is an urge that has simply been caged and restricted, bursting to get out under the weight of a statist driven and tax burdened economy. It is true that entrepreneurs are the new rock stars and the next generation would rather start a business than a band, and it is also true that status in the 2020s comes from your multiple streams of revenue (ideally passive income) rather than your profession or job. But is all this activity entrepreneurialism? The idealised kind which evolves into businesses, gets investment, employs people and builds economies? Or is this side hustle culture more about nurturing people’s passions, a sense of self, and economic survival? Anyone under 30 now effectively identifies as a pro-sumer anyway; fluidly flicking between consumer and producer on apps, in mind and in effort.
More to the point, isn’t all this gigging and hustling, fundamentally stemming from the fact that traditional careers (let alone jobs) do not pay or protect in the way they did for our parents? That the single wage track no longer offers a guarantee? A sensible reaction to the the failure of a wage to be secure, to get you a home, to generate a viable retirement. In fact, if anything, side hustle culture is a failure of capitalism, rather than an exaltation of it.
Courses
I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to the launch of our multi-generational workplace courses. It’s wonderful to know that they are proving such a great resource.
As we’re rolling them out across companies, the different reasons why companies are wanting them are fascinating:
One HR director told me that she had spent hours talking about how to generate a culture of innovation and disruption, only to find that board members and senior management refused to understand their younger, future thinking colleagues and expected them to be just like them. Some enlightenment was needed.
Then there was the law firm who are struggling to teach standard office etiquette amongst their Gen Z trainees and are seeking to roll the course out as part of their ‘welcome to the firm’ package.
And there’s the private equity firm seeking to expand its understanding and policies around maternity and paternity care, and wanting the whole company to comprehend and cater to how most families are now living their lives.
For those new to this newsletter, we’ve produced six separate films on the Multi-Generational Workplace covering a range of issues and themes. More details of each course can be found HERE. For more information about how to access the content, do email Harriet on my team who can answer any questions and forward you some taster clips. Harriet can be found at harriet@elizafilby.com.
The Reading Room
The study released by CCDH details the transformation in climate denial rhetoric. Whereas traditional "Old Denial" narratives challenged the occurrence of climate change or human involvement in it, contemporary "New Denial" narratives cast doubt on the scientific consensus and the effectiveness of proposed solutions to climate change. These newer narratives propagate views like "clean energy is ineffective" or "climate scientists are not trustworthy." In 2018, such New Denial narratives made up merely 35 percent of all climate denial content on YouTube. Presently, that figure has surged to 70 percent.
2. US Gen Z seems to love public libraries
A report from the American Library Association (ALA) in November, reveals that Gen Z and millennials frequent public libraries more often than their senior counterparts, both through physical visits and online services. Out of the survey's 2,075 participants, over half had stepped into a library over the last year. Interestingly, not everyone who visited was an avid reader: the report highlights that 43% of Gen Z and millennials don't consider themselves readers, yet approximately half of these non-readers had been to their local library in the previous year. The report also notes that Black individuals within these younger generations are particularly likely to use library services.
In an intriguing testament to the 21st century depth of human-pet relationships, a woman from Shanghai revised her will to leave her entire fortune not to her three children—who she felt neglected her during her times of need—but to her cherished cats and dogs. These pets, she stated, offered her companionship and support when her own family did not. To navigate China's legal restrictions on bequeathing money directly to animals, she cleverly designated a local veterinary clinic as the executor of her estate. These cats and dogs are in good company; remember Choupette, the cat who inherited a fortune from Karl Lagerfeld, the legendary Chanel designer?
Thanks for reading
Eliza