Multiple jobs: Leaving work to go to work?

Heather Birch landed her first job when she was 12, doing piece work for $14 an hour. She's been working ever since, and expected to.

She just didn't expect to be working this much. Today, at 38, Birch has three jobs, including a full-time job as clinical director of a physical therapy clinic and a part-time gig at a retail clothing store. In what time she has left, she also runs her own business, manufacturing a travel exercise device.

Birch is one of a growing number of Utahns who hold multiple jobs, according to a recently released study by the Utah Foundation, a Salt Lake-based non-profit, non-advocacy research organization. According to the study, Utahns were the third most likely population in the United States in 2003 to hold more than one job.

Multiple job holders accounted for 9 percent of total employment in Utah in 2003, the report stated, up from 7.8 percent in 2002. The national average for that same period held steady at 5.3 percent. Only North Dakota and Nebraska had a higher percentage of multiple job holders, according to the report.

"Utahns' multiple job-holding rates were relatively high compared to the rest of the nation," said Richard Pak, research analyst with the foundation. "And, over the past several years, those rates have risen."

The foundation concluded that Utah's jobs environment is weighted by a three-pronged anchor: underemployment, involuntary part-time employment and declining real wages.

Underemployment, a situation in which people are not being fully utilized in their jobs in terms of education or ability, has risen sharply in Utah — from 5.9 percent in 2000 to 10.4 percent in 2003.

Real median wages have declined 3.5 percent in Utah between 2000 and 2003, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Nationally, wages increased 4.2 percent during that period.

And the EPI found that the number of people involuntarily working part time jumped from 8.2 percent to 14.4 percent during that three-year span.

"The implications of this trend are that while employment figures have been slowly picking up since 2002, a significant number of the jobs being created do not have wages that are adequate for the needs of the population," the Utah Foundation report concluded.

Put another way, it may be that while jobs are being created in Utah, too many of them are part time, and too many of them don't pay enough.