Healing Space | How the IT sector created the moonlighter

Use your existing skills for moonlighting. Ask why you're doing it, and quit when that need is met. (Illustration by Suneesh K)

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

Rishad Premji’s Wipro this week fired 300 employees who were found moonlighting. But the axing is unsympathetic and questionable for more than simply human-resources reasons.

The question of moonlighting, offering work for compensation to an employer not your own, is at its core a question of who owns the output of the mind of the worker. If you insist on laying claim to the product of the mind of the worker after work hours, and you run a business that does not adhere to strict work hours or offer overtime or structure work in a systematic fashion, then you are seeking to own the worker.

The unawareness is remarkable because it is the IT sector that normalized the gig economy that we inhabit today, as it has huge cost and variability benefits for the organization. It gives companies that work on this model access to a varied resource pool, pushes down compensation, benefits, and allows them to hold workers in reserve, sucking up resources that competitors may access to dry out the market. It is gig workers, or workers in organisations that treat them like gig workers, employing them on a project basis and subject to short-term contracts, research shows us, who have had to adapt like all animals in an evolving sociology. Our question is not a legal one but a mental health one—one of an individual’s space for self-determination, self-identity, and autonomy, the right to be more than a moveable and ownable asset and what being held as one does to the self-image.

Also read: Whom does moonlighting hurt, how, and what to do about it?

Because of the precarious nature of the gig economy, workers are left to arrive at their own sense of balance between self-motivation and security. The nature of the workplace being dynamic broke down organizational hierarchies and allowed the self-driven to thrive, merit to be recognized and the unorthodox, the creative and the casual to find its place.

However, it has also meant that employees must source their own self-esteem, pride, identity, compete to find their voice, and lend their talent among a large constantly refreshing workforce. Few will be able to ever take a long-term housing loan, most await deployment to the next offsite location, many work on a different time zone than they inhabit, messing with sleep patterns and body clock, but also opportunities to socialize and form meaningful relationships. This makes them further dependent on the opportunities the workplace gives them. For many who relocate from other cities and small towns, the workplace offers them their only social circuits, entertainment, and stress relief. By thus drawing the employee within the arms of the organization completely, workplaces encourage a co-dependency that only they can satiate. And thus, the workplace comes to possess the life of the worker.

Also read: Rajeev Chandrasekhar backs moonlighting, says companies should not put lid on employee dreams

The worker has to figure out how to live with uncertainty, pay volatility, the potential for mass layoffs, and constant relocation. They must extend themselves to constantly acquire new skills, many of which will lie underutilized. Most seek self-development and DIY wellness to offset their stress, and cope with increasing isolation.

People have been moonlighting for various reasons through the decades. Studies on moonlighting by Arcuri and Lester (1990), Miller and Sniderman (1974), and Mott Mann, McLoughlin and Warwick (1965) did not find any negative effects on the moonlighters, but in fact saw that they were better adjusted and more active in the community. Flexitime, in fact, emerged as a solution to disperse peak-hour traffic in West Germany in the 1970s, from where it travelled to Canada and then the US permit employees to take better control over their work and family lives, and leading to increases in job satisfaction. This gave rise to concepts like peak time pay, when good workers were encouraged to work part-time for greater pay per hour than full-time workers.

Boundary theory measures how a worker engages in boundary negotiation efforts (when they switch from one role to another) and psychological detachment (when they refrain from full-time-job related activities) when the side hustle is similar or dissimilar to the full-time work. Simply put, similar requirements from a job, i.e., a job that uses the same kinds of skills taxes a worker less than one who left work to go drive an Uber or be a photographer. Further research finds that those who are able to get meaningful side hustles (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001) affect experiences at work. Which means, if you’re encouraging workers to take on dissimilar roles, it likely increases their psychological detachment from work. If you encourage them to take on similar roles, it leaves their psychological attachment intact.

Given the inflationary trends worldwide, and the shrinking household income, the technological capacity for work from home, flexible accommodations and the abundance of skill, organisations should in fact be finding ways to encourage workers to be the best they can be in all spheres of their lives, provided their work requirements are met. And their work requirements have to be set in order for them to be met. Organisations that perpetually keep employees on tenterhooks cannot demand loyalty and fidelity. If you would create a multinational multi-domain spanning gig economy, at least be self-aware enough to look in the mirror and recognise yourself as a gig.