Employment security and workers’ moonlighting behavior in Ghana

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of employment security on moonlighting in Ghana as a means to inform policy on enforcing issues of employment security. Design/methodology/approach The paper followed the work of Shishko and Rostker (1976) by applying their approach to the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey data. The paper created an employment index from four variables and used the ordered logit as the main estimation technique. Findings The findings indicated that, as a person with a single job becomes more secured in employment, the likelihood of moonlighting is decreased by 0.03, while for those with two and three or more jobs, the likelihood of moonlighting increased by 0.0297 and 0.0008, respectively, with increasing employment security. This implies that, workers can be made to stick to single jobs by providing them with higher levels of employment security, but once they take on two or more jobs, providing them with employment security will engender the tendency to increase their moonlighting behavior the more. Originality/value With the current harsh economic conditions in the country and the urgent need for multiple jobs (moonlighting) as a risk coping mechanism, little has been done on the role employment security plays as a catalyst or otherwise. This paper fills the gap by employing a comprehensive index on employment security in the case of Ghana.