Forget silent surrender, the next big thing is 'clandestine contraction'. What you need to know about your employee's secret second job

Move above silent abandon, it's time for 'underground contracts'.

Beneath the cute alliterative labels lies a confusing psychological dilemma facing many employees today: what does it mean to work? Why do we do it? When does work work for us? And when does it start ruining our lives?

Clandestine contracts are the inevitable result of a long-broken system that has subverted the needs of the average worker in favor of maximizing shareholder value. Capitalism at its best.

Now people intentionally "overwork" themselves, working two full-time 40-hour jobs without the bosses knowing, just to make ends meet, so they can go forward and feel a sense of financial security for themselves and their families in the future.

How did we get here? The sea change in the employee experience has been slow over the past 10-15 years. Generation Y, like me, entered the workforce in the midst of a recession. We barely survived. And yet, we have always found ourselves faced with a host of difficult scenarios – the rising cost of living, exclusion from the housing market and the postponement of starting a family. Then came Covid and the great work-from-home experiment. More recently, there has been rising inflation, interest rate hikes and a looming recession.

This is what it looks like.

First of all, work exclusively from home. No hybrid. No customer site visits. No business travel. At the height of the pandemic, this was easy enough to achieve without raising a red flag. But more recently, as many return to the office, underground contractors are adamant about maintaining remote work status. They must be. Being called into the office poses a serious risk of being discovered by their bosses.

Second, these people tend to keep meetings to a minimum. They put in 13-16 hours a day and they know that any unnecessary meeting will eat up their precious time. They are diligent about dividing their time between Work 1 and Work 2. But it's never perfect. An underground entrepreneur found himself juggling two training meetings at once. "A lot of times I just had to turn my camera on and mute my stuff to one. There were a few times where I was called upon to respond to something from both companies simultaneously," she said. "So you're really confused...it really hits you."

Third, they do the bare minimum, nothing more. Employers want the opposite. We management scientists have a name for the type of employee who voluntarily commits time and time beyond their contractual duties: organizational citizenship behaviors. Clandestine entrepreneurs do not display these behaviors. They don't go beyond that because they don't have time.

As the world rewrites the rules of work and employment, these are just some of the realities we must face. We humans are a highly adaptive species and we will find out if we have to. If there is a will, there is a way.