Is anyone actually surprised at the phenomenon of polygamous workers? That is, not the exciting notion of increasing numbers of people with more than one spouse (which is, may I remind everyone, illegal) but individuals who work from home and use the opportunity to have more than one notionally full-time job.
If there’s one thing working from home ensures, it’s that you are unsupervised by nosy colleagues who would instantly discern, in an actual office, that you’re working for Wigan council when you’re meant to be committed heart and soul to Kensington and Chelsea. And I give that example because worker polygamy is, it seems, especially a problem in local government.
The National Fraud Initiative which the Government established to detect fraud in the private and public sectors, found 23 cases in preliminary investigations of London boroughs and discovered half a million pounds of overpaid salaries in the course of just a few months. One enterprising man from Whitechapel is being charged with doing three full-time government jobs simultaneously.
If that’s what a preliminary investigation discovered, just fancy what more thorough scrutiny might uncover… those council tax increases could be diminished if we weren’t paying council employees over the odds. And as so often, there is a Tiktok video and various social media hacks to enable the unscrupulous to defraud the system more efficiently. One tip is to use a mouse jiggler, to fool managers into thinking you’re constantly active on your laptop.
There is of course, no issue about having more than one job if all concerned are aware of it. And lots of people do work for more than one employer, remotely or not. The concept of the permanent, exclusive and lifelong good pensionable job is as endangered now as monogamous, committed lifelong marriage. And if one job doesn’t exhaust your time and energy, the gig economy will enable you to take on other commitments.
But the crucial thing is that, in work as in life, there isn’t deception involved. And if you’ve taken on a fulltime job with one employer, they will be legitimately displeased to find that you’re spreading yourself elsewhere. It’s especially tricky when your work could involve conflicts of interest.
There are a couple of obvious reflections here. It looks from this that some local government jobs are rather less demanding than we all thought. If you can hold down two or three council jobs from home, then perhaps those jobs shouldn’t be paid as full time posts – we should stop pretending they are.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if people do more than one job, but let’s not pay for those roles as if they are an individual’s sole income. But if it is important for reasons of confidentiality or competence that people should do just one full time job – if full-time means full-time, then money put into fraud detection is money well spent. A few salutary prosecutions will at least make fraudsters less brazen.
The other moral is that if you want your staff to be monogamous and exclusive, then you’d better get them into the office. If they’re under someone’s beady eye at a desk they’re less likely to stray. And the analogies with our domestic life had better stop there.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
