By Maíl Galo.
The recent report on the employed population in the City of Buenos Aires (CABA) shows a shocking figure: the 12.6% of Buenos Aires workers (more than 198 thousand people) combine two or more jobs. At first glance, the statistic could be interpreted under neoliberal logic as a sign of ambition or economic dynamism. However, when analyzing the underlying reality—precariousness, low wages, and long hours—moonlighting emerges not as a choice, but as the crudest manifestation of collapse of stable and formal work.
Precariousness Disguised as Dynamism
The reality of the multi-employed worker in CABA is that of a subject who spends an average of 46.1 hours per week to generate income. This phenomenon, driven by the need to «supplement income or maintain their standard of living in the face of loss of purchasing power,» is proof of that the labor market has failed to guarantee a decent life with a single source of income.
What is alarming is not only the number of hours, but the quality of the work relationship. The data indicate that, even among employees, the 28.4% do not have retirement discountsa figure that reveals the deep penetration of the informality in the core of the system. Formal work with all its rights and guarantees is an exception, not the rule. The worker is obliged to give up stability and rights in exchange for mere subsistence.
Furthermore, the report highlights that more than six out of every ten multiple employees have Complete higher level certifications. This dismantles the myth that higher education is the shield against precariousness. On the contrary, high qualifications are forced to be diluted in multiple jobs with less stability, evidencing a systemic devaluation of knowledge and professional effort.
The Productive Body and the Biopower of Precariousness
From a perspective of university criticism, such as the one articulated Michel Foucaultthe phenomenon of multiple employment and extended working hours must be read as a mechanism of biopoder contemporary. Foucault described how modern societies control individuals not only through repression, but by managing and optimizing their lives, their bodies, and their productive force.
In this context, the productivity It stops being a quality of work and becomes an existential imperative.
Low wages and instability are the silent tools that force the worker to self-regulate and self-exploit. If the salary for a job is not enough, the pressure is internalized: the worker becomes his or her own supervisor, constantly looking for a second, and sometimes a third, shift or task.
«The body becomes a target, an object and a target of power,» as Foucault conceptualized it.
The multi-employee not only works 46 hours a week, but also lives under a regime of self-imposed panopticism: your free time, your rest, your leisure, everything is colonized by the need to be «productive» to maintain economic survival. It is no longer the boss watching over the worker, but the economic crisis which forces the worker to monitor himself so as not to fall into destitution. Moonlighting is, therefore, the extension of capitalist discipline to the entirety of life.
The Failure of Stability
Multiple employment in CABA is not a colorful fact about the culture of effort; it’s a occupational illness symptom. It is the mirror of an economic model that systematically lowers the cost of living for workers through devalued salaries and structural instability.
This system generates a vicious circle: the lack of formal, stable employment with a decent salary pushes the worker into precarious moonlighting which, in turn, deepens informality and the exploitation of time and body.
As long as the economy celebrates the dynamism of a market that forces the population to work almost fifty hours a week Under the constant threat of insolvency, society will be paying the cost in health, personal time and rights. The grade should not be that of the individual effort, but that of the collective responsibility to demand a job that is, once again, the path to stability and not just to exhausting survival.
Informality: The Cancellation of Rights
This massive informality (which exceeds 42% nationwide and hits youth with special violence, reaching almost 60% in some segments) is the definitive flexibility strategy. The system not only makes wages precarious, but deprives the worker of his future (without contributions) and keeps it in a state of permanent vulnerability. The right to a decent retirement is extinguished, forcing a infinite productivity which only ceases with old age or physical collapse, extending the discipline of work until the end of life.
