‘Polygamous working’ civil servant held multiple jobs, UK investigation finds

20 comments

1. Wake up honey, new corpo propaganda dropped! We now say “polygamous employee” rather than “overemployed” to drive home the *moral deviancy*.

   We’ve got to make sure to blame the employee for holding down multiple jobs, not the organisations involved for employing people to do full time jobs which clearly don’t require a full time employee to perform, and/or failing to monitor performance and catch non-completion of their work.

2. Four roles shows how little you can get away with and meetings never clashing

3. Work from home needs to stop. They need to show 100% of the pay from tax payers is going into the job they’re being paid for.

4. I don’t get it, as long as its not cash in hand having more than one job must be pretty easy to spot. That is unless our systems are old you can’t easily get that info.

5. This makes it clear, they are not paying you for your work, they are paying you for your time. I understand how legally speaking this fraud but ethically speaking this man has done nothing wrong, both his boses didn’t notice and were clearly happy enough with his work not to fire him.

6. I know someone in the Scottish government who ‘works’ full while also studying full time at university. Does absolutely zero work, but due to the pathetic, spinless HR in Scottish government, she’s allowed to get away with it.

7. U.K. has one of the lowest productivity rates in The west.

   Perhaps that’s why people can do two or three jobs without anyone discovering it.

8. Without clicking, I’m going to assume none of this mentions the donations and second incomes of MPs who also got a £20k payrise over the course of austerity in their main job to add onto the £50k they already received and still said it’s not enough to live on whilst largely failing miserably to do said main job let alone show up to work.

9. I dunno if the commenters so far are missing the point, but a civil servant lying about working for other departments so they can claim more than one salary (which btw you pay for) is definitely fraud.

   Doesn’t shine a great light on the productivity of the civil service either.

10. If this was only detected by “a data-matching exercise carried out every two years by the Cabinet Office” – and not the individual departments’ line management pulling them for poor performance – then tbh what’s the fraud?

    The only “issue” I can see is withholding job history during the application process, but again that means the person was able to successfully apply and interview for four different departments.

    If anything this is just a glaring demonstration at how unproductive a lot of the civil service is that someone on a day-to-day basis can simultaneously work three jobs with apparently negligible effect on their output in each role. 

11. Don’t mp’s have multiple jobs? Why is a civil service employee in trouble for this?

12. If there is a single civil servant in the entire civil service who isn’t working solidly from 9 to 5, there needs to be a serious review of their position. Same for all public sector employees. Waste of taxpayer money.

13. “the report said “polygamous working” had become an “emerging risk area” due to changes to working practices since the Covid-19 pandemic – namely, staff working remotely or on a hybrid basis.”
    Bollocks! It became a practice because a large majority of people in the UK are so poorly paid they need multiple jobs to make ends meet.
    The fact this article tries to use Hybrid working and WFH as symptoms is risible.

14. They expect you to be married to your job, let that sink in.

15. lessons learnt

    review vetting, fraud procedures

    is civil service bloated, of course, it is no different from any large organization

    can it be trimmed of course

    but be careful dont throw the baby out with the bathwater

16. I’d like to see him try to get away with this with 2 supermarket jobs

17. I know The Guardian is lore supportive of alt lifestyles than the average, but that title…

18. Ok so he did fraud, yada yada. Whatever.

    He held **two different vetting clearences** without either employer or the vetting agency knowing it?

    Now that is kickable hornetsnnest if ever I’ve seen one.

    You mean to say that when they had an agency investigate him for security clearance not only did they not notice that he had a second job, they also didn’t notice that he already had a security clearance?

    Investigate that vetting department, please!

19. The job centre were literally on at me a week ago to find a second job to “fill out my hours” when I’m working part-time because of health issues

20. Literally so what lol, I don’t get the outrage this headline is supposed to cause

Comments are closed.