Cheyenne Riggs and the multiple-job economy America calls prosperity

Cheyenne Riggs of Martinez is working several part-time jobs to make ends meet, even though she is already “on the payroll” at one company.¹ Her extra work includes collecting packages and caring for other people’s pets.¹ That is not a story about insufficient ambition; it is a story about a labour market in which one job can fail to cover ordinary life.

The NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ survey gathered responses from nearly 10,000 viewers, and only 37% said they were financially comfortable; among respondents aged 25–34, the figure was 7%.¹ Those figures come from a self-selected survey, so they are not a national estimate. But the pattern it captures is visible in harder labour-market data: about nine million American workers are juggling multiple jobs, including more than 800,000 in California.¹

The political mistake is to treat employment as the finish line. The relevant question is whether work leaves a household able to absorb a modest emergency expense without borrowing, missing a bill or taking another shift. The Federal Reserve’s SHED emergency-expense measure is therefore more revealing than a headline employment rate; the BLS profile of the working poor, the Census supplemental poverty measure and United Way ALICE data should be read alongside it, not replaced by national averages.

The distribution matters: only 48% of employed adults in one recent survey felt confident they could find another job matching their pay, schedule and requirements.² Among workers with arrest or incarceration records, just 31% of those who had been incarcerated reported having a quality job.³

Nor does having a job protect people from a deteriorating labour market. About two million Americans had been unemployed for at least 27 weeks in October, representing 27.6% of all unemployed workers.⁴ Riggs is returning to school to become a nurse, hoping to make her income less vulnerable to artificial intelligence.¹

A country that asks workers to stack jobs, side hustles and retraining simply to remain afloat is not demonstrating broad prosperity. It is documenting the failure of wages and institutions to convert employment into security.