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I'm very interested in the current TikTok refugee wave, therefore I read this thread on X this morning:

[Chinese girl] - Is it true that Americans have to work two jobs to survive? doge]
[American A] - Yes
[American B] - I work 84 hrs a week
[American C] - Lots of us I'm working two right now and my dad also works two jobs

When I saw this post, I was just wondering how that could be possible considering that American's GDP per capita for 2024 had reached 86,600 dollars, so I suspected they must be trolling, given that they're also unconventionally claiming that they love communism.

Many articles also confirmed that they are actually trolling, for example this statement:

“A lot of us are smarter than that though so we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app,” she said. “We call that trolling … in short we’re here to spite our government and to learn about China and hang out with you guys.”

Since I was not sure which were trolling and which were not, so I posted my thoughts on WeChat, a Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp. After for a while, an American studying at UM-SJTU commented on my post, saying this:

The Americans are not trolling though A very big portion of the population DOES need to work 2+ jobs to survive living paycheck to paycheck, especially if they are in non-STEM fields.

So I'm not an economics expert, but first thing that came to mind was the much higher cost of living in the USA compared to many other places (including but not limited to China). So the wages are naturally higher, but not enough. Also, since there isn't universal healthcare, that's another added cost component. I also just searched average GDP per capita and what I found was that it's not a good representation of what we're talking about, since it's different than income distribution. The GDP per capita is skewed upwards a lot because the top 1% of earners make so much more than the rest of American society. Also it's a common complaint in America that wages aren't rising to keep up with constant inflation. Hope that gives you some perspective, it's very much a real problem haha

So I did some fact check and encountered this post also on X complaining that life is tough in the United States Maga tiktoker goes in Red Note and can't believe how China has out achieved the United States:

... we have to work two jobs just to keep our roof over our head ...

She complained very seriously, so I thought it would be true.

However, the problem lies in these two issues:

  1. How do they define 'survive'? I'm not an English expert, but I thought 'keep our roof over our head' means that they just want to have a place to sleep. If that's true, does it mean that those poor Americans who only work one job have to be homeless? Does the girl in that video belong to this portion?
  2. What is the percentage of that population?
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    'Keeping a roof over our head' is often used figuratively to mean covering basic living expenses, not just avoiding homelessness. They're saying they need to work two jobs just to do that, so to survive as used here means to live and pay basic living expenses. Commented Jan 16 at 6:27
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    I can't help wondering if this isn't accidentally a straw man. I've been seeing a lot of similar claims lately, but they don't claim this is the case for all Americans. The normal gist of it seems to apply to those earning minimum wage, where their wages aren't enough to pay basic necessities. Seems like a more reasoable claim than this one. Commented Jan 16 at 11:16
  • @JeromeViveiros Could you please provide any sources/links? Commented Jan 16 at 11:19
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    The question could perhaps be written more clearly after looking into income distributions, and why the mean isn't a good value to consider Commented Jan 16 at 16:35

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I primarily will address the title claim, that Americans need to have two jobs to survive, because the question contains a lot of similar but more ambiguous claims ("a very big portion of the population has to....", "keep a roof over our head," and so forth).

As written, the claim likely is incorrect.

That shouldn't be taken to diminish the scale of the problem: there are indeed a lot of people in the USA who work two jobs, and many of them need to do so in order to afford basic necessities. However, this is neither universal, as the most literal reading of the claim would imply, nor true of most of the population, as a less conservative reading would imply.

There is some ambiguity as to what counts as having multiple jobs. A Bankrate survey found 36% of adult Americans working multiple jobs, and the number was as high as 39% previously. The wording in this study was broad, since it asked about "doing anything to earn extra income on the side" of one's main job: that is, selling a few things on eBay or doing the odd UberEats delivery qualifies as much as a 16-hour work day as a server at three restaurants. The US federal government uses a much narrower definition, by which about 5% of the population qualifies as "multiple job-holders," and which may err too much in the other direction. While there undoubtedly are some people who are both "not working two or more jobs" and "not surviving" (i.e., who die), there are also some people working two or more jobs who don't need to do so in order to survive.

To a good approximation, then, the number of people who work two or more jobs can serve as an upper bound to the number of people who need to do so in order to survive, and this number likely is under 40% according to surveys, so it seems likely that neither all nor most American adults need to work two or more jobs to survive.

To address some of the variations of the claim in the question.

  • Whether "a very big proportion" of the population needs to work two jobs is subjective. The numbers given here could support either argument, depending on how one defines a "big proportion." Many people would consider 36% "big," and some would consider even 5% big.
  • The version of the claim that says that Americans must work two jobs to "keep our roof over our head" could be interpreted to mean that most or all Americans are either working two jobs or experiencing homelessness. That would let us add about 650,000 people, or under 1% of the adult US population, and would not materially change the conclusions.
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    Also, while I am not including this in my answer because China's numbers are not relevant to the title question, implicit in many of the posts in the question is that working two jobs is unheard of in China. Most multiple job holders in the USA have various part-time gig jobs, which is a sector that has also taken off in China, so China probably has a fair number of people with more than one job by the standards of the first survey. Commented Jan 16 at 7:32
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    @Obie2.0: Do you know of any study about the number of hours worked. Just having two part-time jobs to get the equivalent (in compensation) of a full-time one strictly qualifies as working multiple jobs, but is quite different from working two full-time jobs. Commented Jan 17 at 19:05
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    Anecdotally, I've also heard of dinks (dual income, no kids) making well above $200K a year and claiming they can't make ends meet. Some people are unable to live within their means regardless of how much they make. I've personally known people who worked full-time salaried jobs with benefits and decent pay who felt the need to have a second job (against the terms of their employment.) Commented Jan 17 at 19:54
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    @MatthieuM. Along the lines of my other response to you in the question comments, keep in mind that things like health insurance are usually not offered to part-time employees so to reach the same total compensation generally requires more total hours of work. Commented Jan 17 at 19:57
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    @MatthieuM. The US Department of Labor has a distribution of hours worked (22% work 41+ hours per week, 5.6% work 60+ hours). (Couldn't find a distribution by total income to see how this breaks down between high and low earners, and this doesn't say how many jobs these people hold.) Commented Jan 18 at 7:34

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