Precarity and second job-holding in the creative economy

Publication type

Journal Article

Series Number

Authors

Publication date

September 3, 2025

Summary:

There is extensive research on creative occupations, problematising precariousness, pay gaps, unpaid work and other issues. Less research, and little quantitative work, has looked at multiple job-holding. Issues including portfolio careers, moonlighting, “slashies” and side-hustles are emblematic, and core to the discourse surrounding the creative economy. We use the UK's Labour Force Survey to analyse the extent of multiple job-holding in creative work, and identify three types of second job-holding, according to whether the main, second or both jobs are creative. We compare the characteristics of individuals for each type, and use Understanding Society to show how they move between them over time. We find that second-jobholding is twice as common in core creative as other occupations, and that people working outside London are more likely to combine creative with non-creative work. Those with a creative second job are unlikely to move to a single creative job over time.

Published in

Cultural Trends

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2025.2540966

ISSN

09548963

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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