Employee Survival Guide® - S6 Ep.135: Two Jobs, One Paycheck- Exploiting Employees

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Comment on the Show by Sending Mark a Text Message.The workplace landscape has fundamentally shifted, with a disturbing trend emerging across American businesses: employees are increasingly being forced to perform two full-time jobs while receiving just one paycheck. This exploitation operates under the seemingly innocuous phrase "adjusting duties," buried in employment contracts that courts have traditionally interpreted with alarming breadth.Recent research reveals the devastating human cost of this practice. The SHRM's Employee Mental Health 2024 Research Series found 44% of surveyed workers feel burned out, 45% emotionally drained, and a staggering 51% completely depleted by day's end. Most telling, 40% report being required to perform more work in the same hours. These aren't just statistics—they represent millions of Americans trapped in an impossible situation.What many don't realize is that even at-will employment constitutes a contract with inherent limitations. The doctrine of unconscionability exists precisely to prevent unreasonable contract terms that no rational person would accept under fair conditions. When employers demand one person perform multiple full-time roles without additional compensation, we've crossed from reasonable business discretion into exploitation. Courts should recognize that employment contracts aren't licenses for unlimited extraction of labor, and principles like proportionality, human capacity limits, and good faith should guide judicial interpretation.For employees caught in this situation, proactive negotiation remains essential. Document increased workloads, build trust relationships with management, and present the business case for fair compensation. Approach these conversations from a holistic perspective that acknowledges company challenges while firmly advocating for reasonable limits. Remember that no employment relationship can sustainably function when one party extracts everything while providing nothing in return. If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts. Leaving a review will inform other listeners you found the content on this podcast is important in the area of employment law in the United States. For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.Disclaimer: For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice.

Hey, it's Mark here, and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about, and a lot more. Hey, it's Mark, and welcome back to another exciting episode. And today we're going to be talking about two jobs, one paycheck, how employment at-will became a license for exploitation. Employers are generally free under the law to adjust the duties of an at-will employee as they see fit. There is almost no exception, I submit, however, that when adjusting the duties of an employee amounts to doubling their workload, it's time to rethink some fundamental principles of employment law. Picture this.

You're hired as a director of XYZ Global Sales Department. Six months later, your employer announces you'll be also taking on a second full-time position as director of operations, a position formerly held by a full-time employee. Sound familiar of everyone? It should be. We see this a lot. Same salary. Double the work. When you object, you're shown the door.

It sounds outrageous because it is. Under current employment law, it's perfectly legal. In fact, as a practicing employment attorney, I have recently seen a market uptick in the number of employees who are terminated or threatened with termination because they are unwilling or unable to take on multiple additional job roles, which were not included in their job descriptions at the time they started working. In a tightening economy, employers are tightening up. Their organizational charts by requiring few employees to do more work. work than they were originally hired to do, sometimes imposing double or even triple positions on unsuspecting employees already overburdened. This is happening right now across America, dressed up in corporate euphonisms like restructuring

or optimization and increased responsibilities, to name a few. The legal justification, a toxic combination of employment at will doctrine, and a boilerplate contract provision that grants employers virtually unlimited discretion to, quote-unquote, adjust the duties. Recent data paints a disturbing picture, according to the trades union in Congress. 55% of workers report their jobs have become increasingly intense over time, with 61% feeling exhausted at the end of most working days. Sherm's Employee Mental Health

2024 research series release for Mental Health Awareness Month found that 44% of 1,400 surveyed U.S. employees feel burned out at work, 45% feel emotionally drained from the work, and 51% feel used up at the end of a work day. A staggering 40% report being, required to do more work in the same amount of time. Further, U.S. employees who feel burned out are nearly three times more likely to be job hunting. These aren't just statistics. They're symptoms of a fundamentally broken employment contract system.

The culprit. Employment agreements that routinely contain provisions like the company reserves the right to require you to work during other or further days or hours for no additional consideration. And phrases like duties, responsibilities, and reporting relationships may be adjusted at any time, end quote. Courts have traditionally interpreted these clauses in employment contracts, both express and implied employment contracts, with absurd breath essentially holding that as long as you're still receiving your paycheck, your employer can pile on unlimited additional responsibilities. After all, you're at will. If you don't like it, you can quit or just be.

fired. Here's what courts seem to have forgotten. Even at-will employment is still a contract, and contracts have limits. The doctrine of unconscionability exists to deny the enforcement of harsh and unreasonable contract terms. An unconscionable bargain is one which, quote, no man in his senses and not under any delusion would make under the one hand, and no honest and fair amounted person would accept on the other hand. Unconsciousibility is determined by reference to the relative benefit of the bargain to the parties at the time of its making, the nature of the methods of employed and negotiating it, and the relative bargaining power of the parties. When an employer demands that one person performed two full-time positions for a single salary, we've crossed from adjusting duties into exploitation. At that point, employment contract at the heart of every employment relationship has become an agreement that no reasonable person would make in which no honest person would accept.

This isn't a reasonable interpretation of contractual discretion. It's an absurd result that courts should refuse to enforce. Our courts, both state and federal, have long held that contracts which purport to impose commercially unreasonable results would be void as a matter of. law. Where the result of the party's interpretation of a contract is both absurd and the opposite of what the parties intended, that agreement cannot be justly enforced. It would be an absurd result to interpret the contract in a manner that leaves one party without a remedy in the event of a breach by the other. As a court cited in cases that I've worked on in cases that have read, where our party is prevented from reaping the obviously intended benefit of the

contract and where an obviously unforeseen windfall will result to one party, the contract is void as absurd. Consider the reducio ad absurdum, Latin phrase. If adjusting duties permits an employee or requiring an employee to work two positions, why not three, five, ten positions? At one, point does a court finally say, this has gone too far? The answer should be never. In reality, one person can perform two full-time jobs. It is not commercially reasonable to be paid one salary for what amounts to two positions. The very fundamental principle of an employment agreement, either express or implied, is one job, one salary. Every employment contract in New York and Connecticut includes an applied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. And it's a famous

court case. From 1983, it's called Murphy. Murphy v. American Home Products Corp. And the Murphy case limited the Covenant's application to at-will employment. It didn't eliminate it entirely when express contractual discretion exists. Requiring an employee to perform multiple full-time roles isn't exercising discretion in good faith, it's weaponizing contract language to extract maximum labor for minimum compensation.

Even broad contractual discretion must be exercised with a modicum of common sense. Encompass within the implied obligation of each promisor to a contract to exercise good faith are any promises which are a reasonable person in the position of the promiscay would be justified in understanding were included. The research is clear work intensification is destroying American workers. The always-on culture enabled by remote work means 36% of workers spend more time outside contracted hours on work emails, while 32% complete more core tasks on their own time. Economic uncertainty drives workers to accept these conditions, fearing that resistance means unemployment. But here's the thing. Accepting the unacceptable should. be the price of employment, or shouldn't be the price of employment. When loyal, hardworking

employees refuse to take on multiple roles for the same salary, they are not being lazy. They are imposing human limits on otherwise inhuman and patently absurd expectations. They're making the rational choice not to sacrifice their health and well-being for unfair wages and impossible workloads. Courts should protect their right to do so without suffering economic disaster. When employers selectively imposed dual positions on female employees, while sparing their male colleagues, they add discrimination to exploitation. This selective enforcement doesn't just violate Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

in state law and city law. It highlights the arbitrary nature of these quote-unquote adjustments. If the business truly needed one person to fill two roles, wouldn't that apply regardless of gender. This discriminatory application of strengths strengthens the unconscionability argument. Oppressive terms selectively enforced reveal bad faith, transforming what we might be defended

as business necessity, which we hear too often in from the courts, and my pet peeve to the courts, into targeted exploitation. Let's reimagine contractual limits here. Courts need to remember that employment contracts, even implied and at-will ones, aren't licenses for unlimited exploitation by employers. Several principles should guide judicial interpretation. Number one, reasonable scope. Adjusting duties should mean modifying existing responsibilities, not multiplying entire positions.

Two, proportionality. Additional responsibility should bear. some relationship to additional compensation. It seems fair, right? But employers are trying to, you know, get a bank bargain for their situation because they realize, especially in 2025, that employees are what? Without leverage to say no. Human limits. Number three. Contracts cannot require the impossible. Two or more full-time positions exceed one person's capacity. It just makes sense. For, good faith boundaries.

Discretion, exercise to extract maximum value while providing minimum compensation violates good faith. Everybody understands that inherently when they see it, but are powerless given the current social, economic, political environment like now, where employees don't have any economic power at the workplace, and employers are just steamrolling over them. The path forward. The current movement offers a unique opportunity. With burnout reaching crisis levels, courts should reconsider their reflexive deference to employers for employer's discretion. The question isn't whether the employers can require anything under-at-will employment. It's whether they should be permitted to demand the impossible. Some courts are beginning to recognize these limits.

The growing acknowledgement of constructive discharge claims when working conditions become intolerable suggests judicial willingness to find boundaries. The next step is recognizing that requiring multiple full-time positions for a single compensation crosses that line. Of course it does. Judges interpreting implement contracts should ask themselves, would I accept this bargain if I weren't economically coerced? Would I want my child to sign this agreement? Of course not.

perhaps it's time to dust off the inconsistibility doctrine, give it some teeth. The employment at will doctrine was never meant to be a blank check for exploitation. Contract law provides tools to prevent abuse. We just need courts brave enough to use them. Because when flexibility means working yourself into the ground while your employer post-record profits for the sake of Wall Street and shareholders, something has gone fundamentally wrong with our understanding of fair exchange and reasonable commercial expectations. The next time an employer claims the right to transform one job into two, three or more, courts should remember, employment is always a contract and contracts have limits.

And those limits exist precisely to prevent the powerful from extracting everything while providing nothing in return. After all, if requiring someone to work two full-time jobs for one salary isn't unconscionable, what is? This is a very near and dear issue for myself. I have a family member who's experiencing this issue currently, and that person is really powerless to change it. I don't step in as the employment lawyer father. I just allow that person to figure its way out, but I know what the end result is. The end result is exactly what the article describes, and in most cases we've seen this in our clients as well, that the employee is really powerless, especially now.

It's, let's see, it's September of 2025, and employers are in full control of the workplace. There is really no leverage employees have. Walter Journal reports. Employees are clinging to their jobs, staying put. Employers are using the job performance improvement plan to try to send the signal to employees to employees to get out, but that's not working. And employees are just staying put to see what's going to happen next because we're kind of an economic turmoil. Both corporations and politics are intertwining themselves. And so we have this now new change where, you know, we've gone and everybody remembers that we had this for a very brief time, this kind of horizon of new employee value, I want to call it that human capital, that employees were able to jump ship and bargain for better pay.

not too long ago in the last five years, and then that's gone away. And employers are seizing more control because it's economically beneficial to them. What will change to resurrect this, I do not suspect, and nor should you, even though the article calls out the judiciary to take a more positive, interactive role with employers in cases. We're legal cases referencing job discrimination typically where this dual, you know, two jobs for a price of one salary situation come up generally in the discrimination context. You won't see it in the whistleblowing context, but you may. But courts themselves are, they're slow to react. They don't want to engage in, you know, policymaking, especially telling employers what to do. So you get this role over intervolvement between, you know, the judiciary, economics, and business all the same time, and courts have what's called a business judgment rule.

A business judgment rule means that they give discretion to employers. And so, you know, I noted the issue of the court's role in this, but that's the last to probably change because the courts are so slow to react. I know you're probably saying, well, hell, they're reacting very quickly at the national level, whatever it is at the Supreme Court level, of course, or the federal judicial courts. But generally speaking, to solve this problem of, you know, having to do two jobs at a price of one, it really takes the employee themselves to self-advocate. And that's why I want to bring that last portion up. and employees who want to bargain with their employers to essentially saying pay me more compensation.

So like back to the family member I'm watching go through this, it takes a bit of courage to do that because people now fear in this kind of clinging to jobs environment approach to rock the boat, they're more likely to take two positions for the price of one instead of saying I'm going to go elsewhere and work elsewhere. But nonetheless, I think a very thoughtful and proactive approach to saying to your manager, who also are under stress these days because managers are, you know, there's fewer managers these days. We've had many layoffs involving managers. So they're under stress as well. So you have to think of a scenario of positioning yourself as a game leader type of employee who's, you know, the Michael Jordans or LeBron James types. But, you know, just think like that. And, you know, with the corporation's, you know, profit mind and your mindset, make the argument to your employer that, you know, I can do these two jobs and we'll do them successfully, but I need more pay and so negotiate. And, you know, you run the risk that they'll say no, but you have to ask.

So I suggest people negotiate because, and treat negotiation not as a one-time ask, be deliberate about it, follow up. multiple times. Make it known to them that you're unhappy about the current arrangement. Force them to examine the issue that they well know what they did to you. You know what I'm talking about here. You have two jobs now with a press for one because they realize they can exploit you and economically exploit you until you say no. And the only fear you have is they'll replace you with somebody who will do that job. But it only runs, you know, a short distance before employees decide, you know, none of them. No employee will do two jobs from one, and the employee will back off and you'll see new hiring take place. So it's a really weird shifting landscape that employees find themselves in.

I would advocate that employees negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, and document things via email every time you do it. So have a verbal conversation, document an email, and build that case for why you should be paid more. you know, if it's a director who had left and you're now doing the director's job, in addition to yours, the director was your former supervisor, you should make the argument that you should be entitled to the director's level of pay. And maybe the argument is, well, you're getting, you know, one person doing two jobs, but you're not having to pay the lower level, you're just having to pay the higher level. So maybe it's a one-third less of a benefit that they're going to have to receive in terms of salary they're going to have to pay you. But they're still getting two jobs, but, you know, they're getting a more loyal employee. Maybe that's where you angle that. You say, listen, I'm down for the long haul for this employer.

I need trust. It's a bargain relationship. You need to trust me to do my job. You need to pay me the most accurate and reasonable pay scale for these two jobs you want me to do and work that angle. That works every single time. So, you know, bleed the culture of the company and, you know, sound out the issues of trust and loyalty. and point out, you know, the negative side of, you know, what can happen if, you know, things go, you know, not according to their plan, you know, they predict that you're going to do it, but, you know, maybe you point out the issues that, well, by doing these two jobs with one salary, we're going to, you know, point out the negative side effects and sell it that way. So that's my brainstorming, just how to get out of this conundrum of a problem that's occurring a lot.

the courts will again be slow to react. The article is designed to prompt, you know, judges to think about this. They do listen to the podcast. They do receive the mailings we send out. We can see them on our list. And so, you know, someone's got to say this. So I'm going to say it. And so try to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and develop the trust relationship with your employer, understand the dynamics that's currently. playing out at that particular job and in the company, you know, be, don't think, you know, single-minded, think, you know, holistically, you know, look above and beyond yourself and your position, look across the field of play within the employer and figure out the, you know, the best path forward for both parties because it's a win-win. It should be as a result. So with that, enjoy. Talk to you soon. If you like the Employee's Survival Guide, I'd really encourage you to leave a review. We try really hard to produce information to you that's informative, that's timely, that you can actually use and solve problems on your own and at your employment.

So if you like to leave a review anywhere you listen to our podcast, please do so. And leave five stars because anything less than five is really not as good, right? I'll keep it up. I'll keep up the standards up. I'll keep the information flowing at you. If you'd like to send me an email and ask me a question, I'll actually review it and post it on there. You can send it to m-C-A-R-U-I at C-A-P-C-Law.com. That's capclaw.com.