Equifax used other employee surveillance methods to determine which workers were violating its employee code of conduct—which Walker told Insider specifies that employees “always need to disclose and discuss outside employment with your supervisor.” Some workers were suspected of calling into interviews with Equifax from their other job sites, and Equifax began noting any employee clocking “abnormally low VPN usage,” below 13 hours weekly, as a red flag.
Equifax employees were informed of terminations in a company-wide email that unsettled some. One fired worker who spoke to Insider said he wasn’t aware of Equifax’s code of conduct when he took his second job. A current employee told Insider that Equifax shouldn’t be using the data it collects for The Work Number to “spy” on its own employees.
The Work Number collects employment records from 2.5 million companies, Insider reported, and when two Insider reporters ran their own reports on the service, payment periods for “almost every job both had ever held was listed in the report.”
Although Equifax’s investigation, which it at one point dubbed “Project Home Alone,” targeted employees with two or more jobs, the company said that this violation wasn’t the only reason that 24 employees were terminated.
“Equifax followed all applicable laws in its handling of this situation,” Walker told Ars. “These employees were terminated because of multiple factors, including in many cases their own admission that they had a secondary full-time position, which prevented them from fulfilling their full-time obligations to Equifax.”
In its story on overemployment, Wired reported that people drawn to the trend found support on Reddit, Discord, and a website called Overemployed.com. In forums, the dual-employed and those aspiring to take on multiple jobs discuss strategies to do it all unnoticed. It seems implied across all forums that employees will need to hide their other jobs from each employer, but Overemployed.com assures visitors that “it’s legal to work multiple remote jobs.” The website compiled a guide that breaks down labor laws in different states.
However, on the very same page, Overemployed.com also foretold of the Equifax terminations by warning any website visitors that employers still seemingly retain all the power: “The truth is, you can get fired at any time whether you work just one or multiple remote jobs.”