Many Gen Zs are working multiple jobs. Are they missing out on their 20s?

Ivy Tran, a 24-year-old international student from Vietnam, works four jobs. Heading into her third year of a bachelor of analytics at Deakin University, Tran, recently diagnosed with depression and anxiety, says this busy schedule often comes at the expense of her mental health.

But she says working four jobs is necessary to support herself and pay the high university fees required to study in Australia.

“I don’t have a choice,” she says.

Ivy Tran, a 24-year-old international student in Melbourne, works four jobs.Credit: Lucas Nguyen Truong

Tran has a part-time office job at a Melbourne media agency, works as a barista, as a freelance marketer and runs a small business selling crocheted flowers. While her hours vary, she has worked every day from 8am to 1am in the past few weeks. Normally, she says these hours are slightly reduced as she often works from 9am to about 7pm on weekdays and 7am to 3pm on weekends.

The number of people under 25 working multiple jobs is on the rise, with the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing that of the 986,400 multiple job-holders in the country, those aged 20 to 24 were most likely to be poly-employed. Employed women are more likely to work multiple jobs compared to men, while multiple-job holders worked an additional 4.2 hours per week on average compared to single-job holders.

Fiona Macdonald, acting director of the Centre for Future Work, says it’s common for young people – particularly students – to undertake multiple jobs as the relative flexibility of part-time work can accommodate university.

However, she says much of the labour market made available to younger people are in lower-paid industries such as retail or hospitality, in which underpayment and worker exploitation are common. Young women in these industries are particularly vulnerable.

The rise of the gig economy also plays a role, and Macdonald says the number of young multiple-job holders “will continue to increase unless we put some boundaries around that”.

Angelique, 21, has held up to four jobs at a time to keep up with the rising cost of living in the past few years. But the Sydneysider, who chose not to share her surname, says this often feels stressful and isolating.

“I don’t feel like I have the opportunity to be a young person,” she says.

Angelique recently completed a Bachelor of Nursing degree and says she spends an average of 40 hours a week working, and that her university classes and study took that workload to about 60 hours. She has worked in industries including health, retail and hospitality.

While studying nursing, she also had to accommodate 830 unpaid placement hours while studying, which required her to work extra hours to afford it.

Angelique is driven to work multiple jobs by short-term financial needs, but in the long term, she would like more housing stability.

“I would love to buy a property and have a stable place to live and be integrated into [a] community, but it just feels very out of reach,” she says.

While we know a lot about the precarious economic conditions young people navigate today, little research exists on the effects of precarious employment or multiple job holdings on wellbeing.

Tran says the long hours affect her sleep and she regularly gets sick or burns out. She has learnt to become hyper-organised.

“I try really hard to balance everything like studying, working, taking care of myself and socialising. But sometimes I need to give up seeing friends.”

Next year she hopes to focus more on her mental health, but says it’s a hard balance to strike given she still needs to fund her studies. Seeing a therapist and taking anti-depressants has also helped.

Professor Dan Woodman, a sociologist at the University of Melbourne who specialises in youth and generations, has researched the disappearance of the nine-to-five workday and its effect on people’s social lives.

“If you’re working in a 24/7 economy, on the one hand it makes it easier to have multiple jobs. But that also means you’re juggling an even more complex schedule than before,” Woodman says.

“We want to spend our time with significant others, particularly in our 20s … and if you all have a more complicated schedule, finding time gets harder.”

Woodman says the nature of work is also changing.

“We live in a culture where there’s this idea of hustle, not so much as a compulsion to spend every moment working so much as a sense of ‘how am I going to build a good life for myself now in the longer term?’

People aged 20 to 24 are more likely to work multiple jobs.Credit: Glenn Hunt

“And that’s about things like building up different skill sets or having multiple back-up plans.”

Whether people’s experience of their 20s – and what they expect from that decade of their life – is changing is complex to answer, Woodman says. With people delaying major milestones such as having children or buying a house, in some ways, he says, people’s 20s are more protracted.

Unlike Angelique, Tran doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on her 20s.

“I’m taking care of the future and my career, so I have to sacrifice something,” Tran says.

Lena Fomicheva, 21, came to Australia as an international student from Russia 2½ years ago.

Russian expat Lena Fomicheva, 21, works two hospitality jobs in Sydney.Credit: James Brickwood

Finishing her Bachelor of Science in Innovative Foods this year, she works two casual jobs in Sydney: one as a host at Hyatt Regency’s Sailmaker Restaurant and the other at Cantonese restaurant Mr Wong’s.

She says balancing full-time study and multiple jobs was a gruelling exercise, particularly during assessment periods, but she doesn’t necessarily consider it a negative.

“It makes you stronger,” she says.

Fomicheva delights in the flexibility and extra income two casual jobs bring.

Although sad about occasionally missing out on social events, she finds having multiple jobs is empowering.

“Why not work in your 20s? It’s the time you have the most power,” Fomicheva says. “You don’t [yet] know what you want to do, so why not spend it finding out?”

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