Tutoring, dog walking, spare-room letting and the quiet rise of the capital’s after-hours economy
Everyone in London Has a Second Job and Nobody Wants to Talk About It
I began to suspect something was up when my dentist’s receptionist turned out also to be my friend’s yoga teacher. Then the man who delivers my vegetable box mentioned that he is, by day, an architect. Then a colleague, whom I had always taken to be comfortably off, cancelled a drink because she had a dog to walk. It was not her dog. Its owner pays her by the hour.
Once you start looking, it is everywhere. A remarkable number of Londoners with perfectly respectable full-time jobs have a second source of income that they mention quietly or not at all. I spent a month asking people about theirs. Most agreed to talk only if I changed their names, which tells you something by itself.
The Gap
The reason is the gap between what a job pays and what a life here costs. Salaries in the capital are higher than elsewhere in the country, but housing, transport and childcare swallow the difference and then some. Analysis from the Office for National Statistics has repeatedly shown how much of a Londoner’s income goes on rent alone. When the main job covers the essentials and nothing else, people find another way to pay for the rest: the holiday, the pension top-up, the deposit they still believe in.
A secondary school teacher I will call Hannah tutors three evenings a week and most of Sunday. She earns more per hour doing that than she does in the classroom. She is not sure how she feels about it. A nurse told me he works agency shifts on his days off. A junior civil servant sells vintage clothes online from a rail in her bedroom and described her room as fifteen per cent bed, eighty-five per cent stock.
The Trades of the After-Hours City
The second-job economy has its own sectors. Tutoring is the largest among graduates, fed by a market of anxious parents that never seems to shrink. Then there is delivery by bicycle, which pays poorly but can be switched on at will. Pet care boomed after so many households acquired dogs and then were called back to the office. Reselling clothes and furniture is a hobby that became an income for many. And there is the spare room, let to a lodger or to a foreign student for a term.
Some of it is cheerful. A graphic designer who bakes celebration cakes at weekends told me it is the part of her week she enjoys most. Some of it is plain tiredness. A man who drives for a ride-hailing app after his office job said he had not had a full weekend off since the spring and had stopped noticing.
Why the Secrecy
I was struck by how reluctant people were to be named. In part it is practical. Some employment contracts restrict outside work, and people fear being thought less committed. But there is embarrassment too. In a city that prizes looking successful, needing more money feels like an admission. Several people said their closest friends did not know. One said her parents did not know, and would be upset to find that the good job they were proud of was not enough.
That silence does harm. It lets each of us believe we are the only one struggling to make the numbers work, when the person at the next desk is doing exactly the same sums.
The Paperwork Nobody Mentions
A word of honest warning, because several people I spoke to had learned this the hard way. Extra income is taxable. There is a modest trading allowance below which casual earnings need not be declared, and a separate scheme allowing tax-free income up to a set limit from letting a furnished room in your own home. Above those limits you must register and file a return. The rules are on GOV.UK, and the advisers at Citizens Advice can help anyone who has let it slide. The online platforms now report sellers’ earnings to the tax authorities, so hoping nobody notices is no longer a plan.
What It Says About Work
There is a cheerful way to describe all this, popular on social media, in which everyone is an entrepreneur with multiple income streams. I heard a little of that. Mostly I heard people who would much prefer one job that paid enough. The second job is a private solution to a public problem, which is that the cost of living in London has outrun what many ordinary, skilled jobs pay.
That has consequences beyond the individual. Teachers, nurses and carers who are worn out by evening work are less able to do the work the city needs from them by day. Some simply leave for places where one salary will do. Employers in the public services told me that keeping experienced staff in London is among their hardest problems, and City Hall has said as much in its own reports, published by the Greater London Authority.
A Modest Proposal for Honesty
I do not have a policy to offer. I do have a suggestion, which is that we talk about it. When I began telling people what I was writing, the confessions arrived unprompted. Oh, I do that, they said, and looked relieved. A city of people secretly working evenings is a lonelier place than a city of people who know they are all in the same boat, or at least on the same night bus.
I should declare my own interest. I have, in leaner months, proofread other people’s dissertations, and I once spent a December wrapping presents in a department store. I was very good at corners.
The subject has not escaped the comedians. The London satirical news desk and The Daily Mash have each had a go at the worker with five jobs and no money, and the joke lands because it is close to the truth. For an explanation of how a joke like that works without misleading anyone, there is the house essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not. And if a headline about London wages looks too bleak to be real, check it against the UK satirical news checklist first. More of my reporting is on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/