Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 18, 1994 TAG: 9408190019
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When Robin Thornburg lost her job as a $25,000-a-year paralegal, she was scared.
Her husband, David, an office clerk, made barely enough to cover the groceries and the rent on their $700-a-month apartment in Arlington, Va. So she is trying to make up the lost income by working two jobs - as a full-time clerk for a loan company and a part-time bookkeeper for a company that rents out bodyguards.
``It kind of stinks, the two of us having so many jobs,'' said Thornburg, who at age 24 matches her former pay of $600 a week, but works 55 hours to earn it. ``You argue about money and about hours, and on top of everything, we are both trying to get through college. We go different ways too much.''
The Thornburgs are not alone. Just as women entered the labor force in huge numbers in the 1970s and '80s, giving rise to the two-earner family, in the '90s one of these earners is taking on a second job, giving rise to the three-job marriage.
New Labor Department surveys of multiple-job holders, which this year, for the first time, are being compiled every month, give statistical underpinning to a trend that had been discernible largely through anecdote.
Today, 7 million Americans, or 6 percent of the work force, occupy 15 million jobs. Most multiple-job holders (56.5 percent) are married; increasingly, nearly as many are women as men.
No other nation approaches the United States in multiple-job holders, and the clear implication of such comparative analysis, says Richard Freeman, a Harvard University labor economist, is that in other countries, wages from one job are sufficient.
``You would have thought that as women entered the work force, that would have been enough additional income, and dual-job holding would have declined,'' Freeman said. ``Instead, the opposite has happened. Women going to work have not brought in enough income.''
Before this year, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics had counted multiple-job holders only periodically, with the last survey in 1991 and the one before that in 1989.
Until the 1980s, those soundings showed, most dual-job holders were men with full-time employment who moonlighted part time. Now almost as many women are dual-job holders. They, too, usually combine full-time and part-time work, the new monthly surveys show, although women are more likely than men to hold two part-time jobs.
Some of the three-job couples go this route because one spouse wants to break into a new line of work that is more satisfying or more lucrative. But the biggest portion, more than 40 percent, take the extra work to pay bills, these and other Labor Department surveys show.
The Gittings family combines both these reasons.
Philip Gittings, 45, resigned in late 1993 as minister of a Presbyterian Church in Caldwell, N.J., where he had earned more than $90,000 a year. His wife, Margaret, also held one job, as a retail executive at $50,000 a year.
``The situation in my last ministerial post was not as much fun as I wanted it to be,'' Gittings said. But he soon found that he was not earning enough in his new, more satisfying job with Executive Career Resource Group in Berwyn, Pa., a company that helps corporations relocate laid-off workers.
With salary and commissions, he is on track to earn $40,000 this year, and already has received $14,000. But with a son entering college, that is not enough, even with his wife's income.
So, while still holding down his job at Executive Career Resource, where he works on average more than 30 hours a week, Gittings set up a consulting firm this spring. He has made $8,000 so far this year as a self-employed personnel consultant.
Wage stagnation has played a big role in pushing married people into so much work, economists say. For three decades after World War II, incomes mostly rose, but in the early 1970s, the progress stopped. Since then, 80 percent of the nation's households have failed to gain ground, after their incomes - mostly in wages - were adjusted for inflation.
For many people, their ``raise'' came from taking second and third jobs. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said he had run into the phenomenon in numerous conversations during his travels as a member of the Cabinet.
``It is symptomatic of the erosion of relatively well-paying employment,'' said Reich, who as a teacher and writer at Harvard University had devoted a lot of his attention to wage and job issues.
The Thornburgs are fighting this erosion by holding down four jobs, according to the Labor Department's criteria. David Thornburg, a 250-pound ex-Army sergeant, is not only a $22,000-a-year office assistant at a law firm, but also a professional wrestler.
``There is excellent money in professional wrestling and semi-fame, if I can catch on,'' said Thornburg, 25. So far, the big money has escaped him; his 13 matches this year have yielded $150 a match, and some marital stress.
``When he does wrestling, he is gone two or three days at a time,'' said Robin Thornburg, who married David in 1988, while he was in the Army. ``What he is trying to do is to become a promoter of wrestling and not just a wrestler, and I approve of that. Eventually, we have to get our lives down to two jobs if we are to have children.''
As the Gittings' situation also shows, money matters, although it isn't everything.
``I did a lot of soul-searching and decided that my best skills were in consulting and in helping individuals,'' not the ministry, Gittings said.
As a consultant, he conducts personnel seminars at corporations and advises companies on such matters as how to calm workers after big layoffs or how to handle highly productive but difficult workers.
If one of his jobs gets his income back to his old level as a minister, will he give up the other?
``Who knows what tomorrow will bring?'' he said. ``I think my income at Economic Career Resource will grow, but I won't give up the other work. We are always in transition in life, and the sooner we recognize that, the more mature we become.''
Monthly surveys that count dual-job holders are not exact, however. Military personnel are not surveyed, for example, so an Army corporal moonlighting off base as a bartender or store clerk shows up as holding only one job.
Among multiple-job holders who are counted, college professors, public school teachers and police officers are well represented. So are single mothers, divorcees and widows.
Robin Thornburg says being laid off as the paralegal at a three-person law firm that had fallen on hard times was doubly frustrating. The paralegal job, if she had held it, would have counted toward a B.A. in legal studies at Marymount College, a degree she now hopes to get next year.
She talks of escaping dual-job holding. After she gets her Marymount degree, she will go for a master's in physical therapy.
``Experienced paralegals can make $40,000,'' she said, ``while a physical therapist starts at $70,000.''
by CNB