Why double jobs and passive income are becoming the new normal
For decades, the promise of work was a simple bargain. Pick a lane, get qualified, climb steadily, and retire with something like security. That story is fraying fast. Across rich and poorer countries alike, the modern working life is increasingly defined less by a single profession than by a shifting mix of jobs, gigs, short contracts, and income streams, some of them sold as passive, most of them anything but.
The language has changed with reality. People talk about side hustles, portfolio work, and being "open to opportunities" as a default setting. Employers, meanwhile, hire in bursts, outsource projects and expect workers to stay flexible. In Bangladesh, where informality has long been central to how people earn a living, new platform jobs, overseas migration, and digital work are adding fresh volatility to an already precarious labour market. In the UK and elsewhere, the supposed stability of salaried work is being eroded by high living costs, housing insecurity and weak wage growth.
What is emerging is not just a new labour market, but a new mindset: careers as a single narrative arc are being replaced by work as continuous adaptation.
A "career" is a relatively modern idea, tied to the growth of large organisations that could offer predictable progression. Even where that model never reached everyone, it shaped expectations: you trained for a role, you built experience inside a field, you gradually traded youth and stamina for seniority and stability.
Today, for many, the ladder has been replaced by a patchwork. Work is assembled. Hours are stretched. Skills are repackaged for new markets. When people do stay in one sector, it is often because switching has become part of survival rather than ambition: the move from one employer to another, one platform to the next, one contract to a different kind of contract.
Global labour data helps explain why. The International Labour Organization estimates that informal work remains vast, with the number of informal workers rising by more than 120 million since 2019 and reaching over 2 billion in 2023. In Asia and the Pacific, the ILO puts informal employment at about two-thirds of total employment in 2023, and in South Asia, it estimates informality at 87%. In economies where most work is informal, the very concept of a single employer underpinning a life plan is the exception, not the rule.
Yet the shift is not confined to poorer countries. In high-income economies, the old model is weakening under different pressures: the rising cost of housing, the spread of temporary and subcontracted labour, and an economy increasingly organised around services, platforms and projects.
Technology was once marketed as the route to liberation from drudgery. In practice, it has often reshaped work into more fragmented forms while concentrating power in the hands of those who control the platforms.
The ILO notes that non-standard forms of work, including gig and platform work, have been driven by new technologies and that these arrangements expose legal and policy gaps. For workers, the appeal is clear: entry is easier than in many formal jobs, and flexibility can help those juggling family duties or education. The trade-off is equally clear: unpredictable income, weak protections, and performance management increasingly mediated by apps rather than humans.
Bangladesh offers a vivid case study of how quickly this model can take root. Studies of platform work in the country describe ride-hailing and delivery firms using an independent contractor model that leaves workers without employment benefits. Fairwork's research on Bangladeshi labour platforms has repeatedly raised concerns about low pay, insecurity and weak contracts across major services, from ride hailing to delivery and home services. A Friedrich Ebert Stiftung report on the "platform economy" in Bangladesh frames these workers as part of a growing precariat, pulled into app-mediated jobs when other options shrink.
The point is not that platform work has replaced formal employment. It has not. The point is that it has normalised a style of working that looks less like a career and more like a constant search for the next shift.
Bangladesh's labour market has long been defined by informality, family enterprises and migration. What is changing is the texture of that informality and the intensity of the scramble.
ILOSTAT, the ILO's statistical platform, puts Bangladesh's informal employment rate at 80.9 percent in 2024. The same source lists Bangladesh's unemployment rate at 3.6 percent in 2024, a figure that can look reassuring until you ask what kind of work people are actually doing, and how much it pays. In countries with large informal sectors, unemployment is often low not because jobs are good, but because households cannot afford not to work.
For younger people, the problem is sharper. ILOSTAT's snapshot for youth not in employment, education or training puts Bangladesh's youth NEET rate at 15.4% in 2024, with a pronounced gender gap. That represents a substantial share of young people cut off from both formal labour markets and the training routes that might lead to better work.
At the same time, Bangladesh is facing structural pressures that make stable careers hard to build. A labour market profile produced by the Danish Trade Union Development Agency and Bangladeshi partners points to weak collective bargaining coverage and flags automation risk in industrial employment, alongside low social protection coverage. In that landscape, people hedge. They sell products online while holding a day job. They drive ride-hailing at night after factory shifts. They keep one foot in a family business while chasing contracts elsewhere.
In the UK and elsewhere, "passive income" is often sold through property, dividends, online courses, affiliate links and financial products. In Bangladesh, the phrase circulates too, increasingly through social media, but the underlying reality is different. For most people, the closest analogue is money sent by relatives abroad, income from a small plot of land, or earnings from a micro enterprise that still requires constant effort.
Digital work is often placed in the passive income bucket by influencers, but much of it is precarious labour sold to distant clients. Bangladesh's push into IT and outsourcing shows both the promise and the limits. A recent Business Standard report put Bangladesh's ICT exports at $724.6m against a far larger stated ambition, with computer services making up the bulk. For skilled workers, this can mean access to international markets and higher pay than many local jobs. For the labour market as a whole, it can also mean intense competition, unstable demand, and income tied to algorithms and client ratings.
The appeal of passive income is easy to understand. It offers a fantasy of escaping wage work in a world where wages often do not stretch far enough. Yet the practical outcome for many households is the opposite: more work, spread across more tasks, with the risk shifted from employer to worker.
If careers are dying, it is partly because immobility has become expensive. People move jobs to chase pay rises, because promotions are scarce, or because employment itself has become a series of short engagements. They move sectors because technology and trade reshape demand. They move cities because rural livelihoods are squeezed. They move countries because the wage gap is too large to ignore.
In Bangladesh, that movement is increasingly shaped by climate as well as economics. A Reuters report on a World Bank assessment said rising heat costs Bangladesh about $1.78bn in 2024 and led to the loss of 25 million workdays in that year alone. Heat stress is not just an environmental story. It is a labour market story, pushing workers to juggle hours, shift to indoor work when possible, or accept more precarious jobs that fit around the constraints of health and season.
The policy response is often framed as skills and jobs, and those matter. But protection matters too. In April 2025, Reuters reported that the World Bank signed financing agreements with Bangladesh, including support for a social protection project intended to serve millions of vulnerable people through cash assistance, livelihoods support and skills training. In a world of patchwork work, the safety net increasingly determines whether flexibility is empowering or simply punishing.
The death of the career does not mean the end of ambition or professional identity. For a minority, especially those with scarce skills and strong bargaining power, career arcs still exist and can be lucrative. But for growing numbers, the organising principle of working life is shifting from progression to resilience.
That has consequences. Pension systems designed around continuous employment struggle when people zigzag between formal and informal work. Labour laws built around a clear employer-employee relationship struggle when platforms classify workers as contractors. Education systems struggle when the job market demands constant retraining while offering no guarantee that new skills will be rewarded.
Bangladesh shows these tensions in concentrated form because informality is already the norm, and migration already functions as a private welfare system for many families. But the broader drift is visible far beyond South Asia. The question for governments, employers and workers is no longer how to restore the old career ladder. It is how to build security, rights and dignity in an economy where most people are expected to keep moving.
