Hi all, Thanks for reading this post. I'm in a really rough situation right now with work/home/finances. Recently (January) I took a job across the country and moved my spouse and I to live there. My spouse had recently just quit her job knowing that we were going to move and she hated it, so essentially I've been supporting my family for the last ten months on my paycheck... Needless to say it's been rough. We've basically destroyed my credit, but it's still manageable. I live in the DC metro area of the US.

All of this to say, I checked our employee handbook and it says it's okay if we have a secondary job as long as it's not for a competing firm or something to that effect. I told them I'd basically be doing menial labor type work, stocking shelves whatever. My boss basically asked why my spouse isn't doing that kind of job in the mean time... Not that it's any of my boss's business but she's an injured veteran, she can't just do most menial labor type jobs. So my boss told me to send an email to HR to flag my situation to them, and HR basically came back with this boilerplate but overall rude response saying if your second job interferes with your first, we could fire you.

So an important note is my current job... Is working me to death. I'm pretty certain it's low-key illegal. Which is hilarious because I work in a job field with high scrutiny about our hours/overtime/etc. as contractors. My team is also currently understaffed. For the last month, I had about 40 hours of overtime, to get an idea of how much work I'm doing. I do not get paid for my overtime, I am salaried, but the client is billed according to my overtime so they care very deeply about overtime hours. My team lead left to go to a less toxic project, and I essentially got promoted into her position. They told me financial part of promotions do not happen until December, but they piled the work on me anyways. Shady, but okay what am I supposed to do at this point. But then they sent an email saying OVERTIME IS BAD, IT MUST GET APPROVED! But then told me no, we are concerned about you working a second job because even though it's not a conflict of interest, what if we need you to stay late? (Okay so I am or am not allowed to work overtime...???) Anyways... All of this to say of course the company is trying to protect themselves in case the situation looks bad in front of a client.

So I'm wondering... What position am I in to protect myself? I am pretty certain that I will be okay working two jobs, I studied full time and worked full time when I was in college and made it out fine. It was awful but I still graduated in great standing and in good standing with my employer. I don't plan on keeping this up forever, just to get a little bit more wiggle room in my credit, so a couple of months maybe. Especially during the holiday season.

TLDR: my company is alluding to disciplinary action/firing me if I can't maintain their 8 hours of overtime a week. What can I do to protect myself in case they decide to execute something?