OSAKA(Japan), Sept. 7: From 9 to 5, Hiroko Yokogawa toils at a small architectural design firm, doing clerical work and managing accounts. But even when her shift is over, her day’s work is nowhere near done.
She might go home and promote products and stores on her blog. Or in another role, as a work-life coach, she might meet a client for a consultation. Ms Yokogawa, 32, makes about one-third of her income from her side jobs, which take up an average of three hours a day on weekdays and as many as five hours a day on weekends.
“I initially started doing extra work to have more wiggle room in my income — cash to spend on fashion, going out or for savings. But now I try to do work that will be useful to me in the future,” Ms Yokogawa said.
For decades, the standard career path was to graduate from college, join a company and to stay there until retirement — one job for life. But with salaries down more than 12 per cent over the last decade amid an uncertain labor market, young, mostly single Japanese are increasingly making ends meet by working second or even third jobs.
A survey in January by the Internet market research company Ishare found that almost 17 per cent of workers ages 20 to 50 had a side job.
Despite long working hours — the eighth-longest in the world, according to one recent measure, though with overtime often going unreported and unpaid — almost half of the workers questioned last year in a survey by the government-affiliated Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training expressed interest in side jobs. Nearly 90 per cent said the main reason was a desire to have extra spending money.
“The biggest cause of the increase is young people trying to increase their short-term earnings in the face of severe economic and income conditions,” said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “But it’s also a form of risk management for workers fearful of losing their main jobs.” The unemployment rate in Japan was 5.2 percent in July.