Moonlighting Serenade for Women : More Depending on Second Income for a Host of Reasons

Arlyn O’Mara is one of the thousands of women who jam shopping malls each Christmas season--not to shop but to moonlight for some extra holiday spending money.

Although she is employed full time as a dividend analyst at Prudential Insurance Co. in Woodland Hills, where she has worked for 25 years, and earns a salary at the top of the clerical wage scale, working nights has become a way of life.

She began moonlighting six years ago after her divorce at a time when she wanted to give her teen-age daughter a special Christmas.

Depends on Extra Income

Her youngest daughter has since moved out on her own, but O’Mara has continued working the same two jobs year-round, 55 hours a week or more. Now she has grandchildren’s gifts to shop for, and her budget depends on the extra income.

Most of the women she works with nights at J. C. Penney’s Northridge Fashion Center are doing the same, she said, working as many as 70 hours a week to keep themselves and their children in a semblance of the middle-class life style they were accustomed to when married.

It’s a solution to the male-female wage gap that is spreading. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that three out of 10 Americans who moonlight now are women, up from one out of seven 15 years ago.

While the number of men working two jobs has remained steady at about 3.3 million nationwide, the number of women who moonlight has more than doubled between 1969 and ‘79, jumping from 658,000 to 1.4 million.

Many women turn to sales clerking as a second income; stores with long hours and weekend work require large numbers of part-time employees.

Barbara Coatsworth, manager of Penney’s credit and catalogue departments in Northridge, estimated that 80% to 90% of her night and weekend crew are moonlighters, and she’s all for it.

Qualified Employees

“We get more qualified people that way,” she said. “One woman in my department works with computers all day on her regular job, and she gets through our computer orders here at night in no time. I find this kind of experience very helpful.” Most of her workers are stable, older women, she said.

Other employers are less enthusiastic. Barbara Skarupa, personnel manager of the Northridge Sears, Roebuck store, said one out of eight of the store’s employees is a woman with another job. The numbers would be greater, she said, but the store tries to discourage these women.

“They are just not dependable. Many of them can’t handle it,” she said. “They have too much to do and too much guilt. I try to talk them out of applying for the job. I tell them, ‘I think you’re better off lowering your standard of living,’ but they feel they can’t make it without a second income. They have no husbands. They’re single parents, trying to make ends meet and support the kids.”

Her store pays part-time workers $3.80 per hour. Skarupa speculated that the women can’t afford to hire baby-sitters on these earnings.

“I think they just leave the kids at home alone at night,” she said, “because they get so many phone calls and so many emergencies occur that couldn’t happen if the children were being watched.”

Getting a second job is often a woman’s first response to the realization that divorce radically will affect her life style. For every one who manages to hold down two jobs, many try and fail.

Kathy Reiser got a $4-an-hour job as a grocery store inventory counter a couple of years ago, after a separation which left her with two preteen children to support. Her $20,000-plus salary as a Van Nuys insurance underwriter and a $150-a-month child support payment were not enough for her to meet her mortgage payments, she said, so she took the extra job to keep her home.

“I lasted four weeks,” she said. “I either worked shifts from midnight to 7 a.m., or from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. (on the second job). I was going from work to work without a break.

“I worried about the kids all the time. That’s all I thought about,” she said. Her children stayed home alone with the doors locked and phone numbers of close neighbors at hand while she worked.

The hardest part of the experiment was physical: lack of sleep and long hours of training. “I got sick after about a month,” she said. “I just couldn’t do it any longer.”

She gave up, sold her home and has no regrets. “I could never do that again,” she said.

“Studies show that a woman’s standard of living goes down 40% after a divorce, while a man’s standard of living rises,” said Devora Lockton, a Glendale psychotherapist who specializes in women’s problems. “And three-quarters of separated women aren’t getting child support two years after a divorce.”

Lockton said holding down two jobs doubles the guilt many working mothers feel: “You feel you’re not doing a good job either as a mother or on the job.

“Just working per se doesn’t mean that your kid’s going to have problems, but if you’re working two jobs, you’re not seeing your kids at all. One of the hardest problems is just keeping up your stamina,” she said.

Skarupa said the most successful moonlighters are young “goal-oriented” single women without children, saving for a special purchase like a car, or older woman whose children are nearly grown.

How do these women manage homes and two jobs?

“You do less of something else,” O’Mara said. “It wears you down sometimes, but necessity gives you that adrenaline to get the energy. There are times when you just collapse, but that’s true of raising children, too.”

The biggest disadvantage she sees is that, “You miss out on family things like birthdays and holidays. You just don’t have time. But, for me, it’s really not the burden it could be because of the people I work with. We switch hours and help each other out.”

One of the women O’Mara works with is an elementary school teacher. Anita Zepeda started working at a department store during summer vacation two years ago, and “just kept on,” she said.

“My pay is sufficient for me to handle my bare living expenses,” she said, “but the second job gives me my spending money for the week.”

She is one of four teachers in her San Fernando Valley school who moonlight. Teaching is one of the most frequently supplemented jobs, according to the Department of Labor.

Zepeda is raising a 13-year-old goddaughter, who stays with neighbors during the 20 hours a week Zepeda works at the store.

She said, “I think I’m going to have to quit” the second job by next year. But, first, there’s one more Christmas to get through, and presents to buy, and she toughs it out.