Second jobs keep this rich man's town afloat

14 May 2017 - 02:00 By Bruce Whitfield
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Everyone in Omaha, Nebraska, seems to be hiring. The jobs are mostly casual, advertised in shop and restaurant windows, but they are hiring. It makes the place feel oddly prosperous compared to home where makeshift signs at building sites and elsewhere warn jobseekers in multiple languages to not even bother applying.

The US is enjoying its best employment rate in more than a decade, with only 4.4% of its population out of work.

On the surface, Omaha seems pretty prosperous. It's littered with block after block of strip malls populated mostly by upmarket burger joints and bars serving a vast array of craft beers.

But scratch the surface and few are particularly busy and certainly none of them is overrun by customers. There are indications that several national firms are shutting up shop, leading to job losses. It's this sort of reality check that has restrained the US Fed from "normalising" interest rates.

While more Americans are at work than at any point in the past decade, more and more of them are having to do multiple jobs simply to make ends meet.

Omaha is a bit like Bloemfontein. Without the charm. The sprawling city, somewhere close to the middle of America's Midwest, is home to between 500000 and 600000 people. Its roads are well-paved and the interstate that cuts through the city seems overly generous as a conduit in a city which has no obvious issues with traffic flow.

The urban sprawl is surrounded by miles of neatly ordered farmland dotted with human settlements in a patchwork of maize and soy. This is where much of the US's food is produced.

I spent last weekend in Omaha with 40000 others chasing the American dream - to learn from local boy Warren Buffett how to build extraordinary wealth in a single lifetime.

In any city, taxi drivers are a font of wisdom. After small talk about Buffett, the AGM and the fact that Omaha is also the birthplace of the 38th president of the US, Gerald Ford, conversation turns to what it's really like to live in the city.

The Uber driver who picks me up at Eppley Airfield outside Omaha moves his massive pharmacy textbook off the front seat. "I'm graduating on Friday," he says proudly, and explains how the flexibility of the Uber app means he can flex his time without worrying about a boss.

Later I meet Matthew, who is driving Ubers after moving back to Omaha from California to look after his ailing mom. He has been able to drive as much as he wants without having to report to a boss, and can opt in and out as it suits him.

Travis is on his lunch break. He works for an Omaha company that writes software for cellphone companies around the world, including MTN. He is using his break to do a couple of rides to supplement his income. With three kids, it allows him to earn more at times that suit him.

Times, as it turns out, are pretty tough in middle America, and the movie cliché about hard-working Americans doing several jobs to make ends meet holds true among a sample of five or six.

Asaad teaches statistics at the University of Omaha. His wife and son, who work in retail, are both losing their jobs because their companies are closing their local operations. He makes up for their lost income by driving for Uber at weekends, relieved that he has an option flexible enough to fit around the demands of his university work.

All the drivers I rode with were short of money. Not one wanted to do the job in perpetuity but found Uber a useful top-up for incomes that were under pressure. None was waiting for the economy to improve or for the state to bail them out. They are on their own and understand it's up to them to make a difference in their own lives using whatever tools they have at their disposal.

Uber happens to be one of them.

Whitfield is a public speaker on the political economy and an award-winning financial journalist and broadcaster

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