Corporate culture is brutal. It is mainly concerned with generating vast amounts of cash to fund the luxurious lifestyles of the management and/or the owners. The well-being of the people who do all the hard work to actually turn that aim into reality (a.k.a. the employees) is not high among the list of agenda points of employers, if at all.
There are hardly any employed people in the world, who are satisfied with the salaries the are being paid for their services. Those salaries always fall somewhere short of fulfilling some basic life necessity, passion or goal that the employed person might have.
The reason for that is not surprising: the concept of salaries exists to serve the interests of corporate bosses, who utilize (or exploit) their privileged standings and superior economic resources to ‘buy’ the services of talented individuals at prices which strike a middle-ground between the lowest salary expectations of the potential workforce, the minimum wages set by government regulators, the standard wages offered by industry competitors for similar services, and a figure which the employer considers just enough to not hurt their own interests too much.
In simple terms, the employers want to pay only an amount to the employees which does not end up negatively affecting their own bottom-lines, instead of a sum that will allow the employees to live a healthier life by fulfilling all of their basic needs, and lead to personal growth and wholesomeness. An aim famously summed up in a sentence by Thomas Jefferson as “the pursuit of happiness”.
Corporate greed and mass layoffs
Corporations will not shy from throwing away the employees even at those minuscule salary packages, if they think that even the current number of employees are too expensive for the company to afford. Consider this, several giant corporations whose CEOs and managements are making millions of dollars a year have ended up firing hundreds of thousands of employees in 2022 alone, with the Challenger Job-Cut Reporting a staggering 43,000 job being cut inside USA in the month of December alone.
This corporate bloodbath was even severe in the tech sector. Stanford University researcher Melissa DeWitte has reported more than 120,000 layoffs by tech behemoths including Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Netflix, Apple and Microsoft, among others.
The effect of layoffs on the laid-off
With that many layoffs across the board, one has to wonder what happens to those who are being told they no longer have a job in the company they’ve spend so much time and energies serving.
Having all the expenses and bills associated with modern life, with no longer a way to fund all of those expenses is something that breaks down even the strongest of human beings. Such people often resort to desperate measures such as taking bank loans, resorting to get-rich-quick ponzi schemes, or worst of all, resort to illegal or criminal activities.
The Side Hustles
The effects of losing a job and the associated livelihoods can be devastating. For that reason, the concept of side hustles has become popular among people who do not want to depend on their daily jobs to be the only source of sustenance.
Side hustles are basically jobs and work, which generate varying levels of income for people, without having to be fully employed at any place. These jobs ideally require a reduced amount of time and energies than full-scale jobs, and provide a useful supplementary income.
While side hustles were hard to come by in yesteryear, the growth of internet-based economies such as eCommerce and freelancing has completely transformed the side hustling landscape. There are numerous ways of developing alternative income streams, while working online from the comfort of home, and without having any bosses or corporate overlords to answer to.
That might sound too good to be true for some, but it shouldn’t. There are approximately 73+ million freelancers in the USA alone by year 2022, whereas a whopping 1.5 billion (46% of global workforce) is either freelancing or self-employed according to International Labor Organization’s 2022 report.
The statistics in eCommerce are equally compelling. More than 3 billion people use online platforms for shopping, with the biggest online marketplace (Amazon) boasting 300+ million users in 2022, and a total industry-wide market cap which is expected to exceed $6 billion in 2023. It is not hard to see anyone with some useful set of skills to carve their own small piece of online economy, and use it to supplement their 9 to 5 job income.
If you are wondering what exactly can you do on these online platforms to supplement your 9 to 5 income, we’re here to tell you exactly that. Let us begin:
- Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a fulfillment method in the world of eCommerce. For the layman, it is a form of business where the seller of the product does not actually own or manufacture the product themselves. Still confused? Just think of a dropshipper as a middleman.
What happens is that some product manufacturers are not interested in marketing their products to gain exposure, or even sell them unit-by-unit to earn profits. They just want to produce those products, sell them at wholesale rates, and be done with it.
Any person worried about not generating enough money through their daily jobs, and has a talent for online marketing, can jump into the fray (as a middleman) and strike a deal with those manufacturers (also known as suppliers). The suppliers agree to charge a wholesale fee for their products, and agree to ship the product wherever the middleman (dropshipper) tells them to.
The middleman then:
- Uses their marketing talents to finds new customers for the product.
- Agrees to sell the product at a higher price than the one paid to suppliers.
- Tells the supplier to ship the product to the designated customer.
- Keeps the difference as fee for his troubles, when the customer pays up.
See? Easy peasy.
OK, we get it, it’s not exactly easy. One needs to find a trending product and willing suppliers, and has to spend resources while marketing online. But they can do that easily in their spare time while sitting at home.
- Content Writing
For those people who are good with words, this is for you. Content writing is a hot-selling service on freelancing platforms, and comes in many varieties.
If someone with a talent for writing has experience in any industry or department such as health, beauty, sports, social issues, judicial matters and the like, they can head over to freelancing platforms, and find people who will hire them to write blogs and articles related to these industries.
If articles and blogposts aren’t your thing, there are still plenty of options for aspiring writers. You can sell your services to eCommerce sellers, who want someone to write beautiful descriptions for their products, which inform the reader about their product as well as entice them to buy it. Or you can resort to copywriting, wherein you write marketing and promotional materials for various businesses, to generate more traffic towards their business.
Those people are usually not looking for a solitary blogpost or copy either, as most of them will potentially hire you on a recurring basis if they like your work enough. So, work smart, impress them, and you have a solid source of income at your hands by simply staying at your laptop and mixing all the words together that you’ve learned in your whole life.
- Graphics Design
But what if marketing other people’s products and businesses, or writing all day long in front of a laptop is not your strong suit, and your interests lie in creating beautiful graphics through various computer software. Well, guess what, internet has you covered as well.
There are numerous clients looking for people who can create meaningful and catchy graphics for them, to serve a variety of purposes. Those graphics could be small logos that businesses want to use for their online website. They could be thumbnails for youtube or twitch videos, they could be supplementary sources of information or infographics for a newly-released product on an online platform; the possibilities are endless.
- Coding
For those of you with experience in writing long lines of complex code, and then watching the magic happen on the computer screen, there are plenty of guys looking for your services.
Anyone proficient in C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, CSS and other popular computer languages can easily sell their services to prospective clients, for a decent amount of cash. There is a big market out there for coders who are good at their jobs.
Conclusion
In today’s day and age, having a solitary source of income is simply unsustainable for every person. That problem has been accentuated by the recent glut of mass-layoffs by the corporate sector, who do not much care about the employees that are being put out of work. It is up to those employees to look after their best interests, by developing side hustles which they can do in their spare time to provide a supplementary source of income. For whatever it is worth, internet-based economies such as eCommerce and freelancing have made it a lot easier to do that.