Job Stacking Is Not Fraud
Please use a better argument
There has been much ado recently on Substack regarding the moral and ethical merits of “Job Stacking.” As a job stacker myself, I tend to abstain from getting into these types of debates, although there are some pretty obvious rebuttals, such as the fact that if you are completing your work and receiving “satisfactory” performance reviews, you are clearly holding up your end of the employment bargain, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
While this seems self-evident, I tend to avoid “rationalizing” job stacking in this manner because I feel it cedes institutional legitimacy to the corporation that I flatly reject. To debate the ethical merits of job stacking is to accept an institutionalist framing where the interests of corporations are inherently more legitimate than those of the workers. Ironically, leftists of a generation ago would have agreed with me, but now that they control the institutions, they have become the establishments biggest supporters. Sad.
That being said, there is a specific claim that I’ve seen thrown around a lot, which is factually inaccurate, that job stacking is fraud. This is incorrect. As an example, let me tell you about a friend of mine, let’s call him Jeb, who actually got “caught” job stacking. He had gotten a second job in a somewhat related industry, and the CEO’s happened to know each other. Job Two was a small enough company that the CEO was still aware of each new hire, and he noticed Jeb was coming over from the company his buddy ran. I don’t know the details, but I imagine the conversation went something like this:
CEO 1: “Hey, I saw our new hire, Jeb, used to work at your company.”
CEO 2: “Used to? I think he still does.”
CEO 1: “You sure he didn’t put in his two weeks or something? We just hired him.”
CEO 2: “Sure didn’t.”
CEO 1: “Son of a bitch.”
People in the “lifestyle” are often worried about things like mouse tracking, meeting overlap, etc, but the only guy I know who actually got caught just got unfathomably unlucky. He did get fired (from both jobs). But you know what didn’t happen to him? He didn’t get prosecuted. He didn’t get sued for damages. He didn’t have any legal proceedings brought against him whatsoever. Do you know why? Because job stacking is not “fraud.”
Of course, employers want you to dedicate yourself entirely to their company, because it’s in their own best interest. They will often include clauses in employment contracts stipulating as much. These clauses can be grounds for termination, as in the case of Jeb outlined above, but their violation does not constitute fraud. Many employer contracts also stipulate policies on drug use, but violating them isn’t fraud. If you show up to work high, you might get fired, but you haven’t committed fraud.
Implicit in the accusation of fraud is usually the claim that the employee is not working the full 8 hours a day at both jobs, and thus violating their “contract.” But, this is also silly. Even if Jeb had been putting in a full 80-hour week (ie 40 hours at each job) he still would have been fired, because each company wants to monopolize his productive capacity. Nobody in the “laptop class” works 40 hours a week. Indeed, the plethora of “quiet quitting” and “this meeting could have been an email” think-pieces that popped up during COVID attest to this fact.
If Jeb had been working one job, and putting in two or three hours a day, nobody would have had a problem with it, or been trying to argue that he was “violating contract law.” It’s only because he was exploiting asymmetries in the sclerotic managerial economy of our late-stage empire that those beholden to the regime are salty. And hey, that’s fine. If you are a corporate lickspittle, and you want to defend the honor of our sacred corporate overlords, you are free to do that. But, for your own sake, don’t bandy about spurious claims of “fraud” because it makes you sound like a retard.
If, however, you want to read more thoughts from me on the Post-Capitalist Economy, and other random nonsense, you can subscribe to my Substack like the rest of the cool kids.
For a time I did some job stacking, but quit after some time one of the jobs. What killed it for me were the meetings. Most of them, I'd say 90%, completely useless, but it was not only the time spent on meetings, it is also the fact that a half-hour meeting steals your productive soul for at least a couple hours. I've never found something more demotivating, more detrimental to focus and concentration than useless meetings.
A meetings-heavy job easily robs you of at least 50% of your productivity.
Loads of nurses accept bonuses contingent on serving a certain amount of time in a given place or hospital system. Then they leave and take another job before their time has been served. You know what happens to them? Also not prosecution or even civil clawback.
I get it. We have more people than we know what to do with but kneecapping guys who will work as hard as they have capacity to, doesn’t make someone else more useful all of a sudden.