Robert Herjavec shares the harsh lesson his dad never meant to teach him: 'Nobody in life ever worked harder'

“Nobody in my life ever worked harder than my dad,” Herjavec said on Instagram. “The man worked three jobs in a factory, sweeping floors.”

That hard work was invaluable to Herjavec’s family. But it didn’t make them wealthy.

“What I learned out of that was, if you work hard, you’ll never be poor,” Herjavec said. “But just because you work hard, doesn’t mean you’ll be rich. You have to be smart with your money.”

More Americans than ever are stuck working multiple jobs

Herjavec’s father isn’t alone in needing to work three jobs just to outpace poverty. In fact, there are more people working multiple jobs now than there have been in the past 25 years.

“When people start adding jobs, and certainly a second full-time job, that says something about affordability, and about needing money to meet household expenditures,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed, to the Washington Post.

There are some people who are overemployed, or intentionally working at least two full-time jobs — sometimes without telling either employer. But many people are either adding on gig work like DoorDash to a current full-time job or working multiple part-time jobs instead.

The number of people in part-time work who would rather be full-time has been slowly rising over the past few years. Economically, that’s a bad sign.

“This is a classic barometer of underemployment, and it tends to go up when the labor market is getting worse,” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, to the Washington Post.

Part-time work is convenient for employers because they don’t have to pay their workers benefits. Retail and food service industries especially tend to hire multiple part-time workers instead of one full-time worker, leaving multiple workers both without benefits and potentially without enough hours to make ends meet.

As a result, some part-time workers pick up multiple jobs — although the short-term scheduling inherent to a lot of part-time work can make it difficult to balance.