By day, Devone Kelly is a hairdresser. At night, she dances nude under the stage name of "Caramel" because her hairdressing business has nose-dived.

Delta Air Lines employees JoAnn Bullard and John Mahoney work nights at the airline so they can go to other jobs during the day to make up for the two pay cuts at the carrier in the past five years. Bullard cleans houses. Mahoney works at Lowe's.

Ben Gray/bgray@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Waitress Kitti McCreary (center) talks with bartender Tara Love at the Magic City adult nightclub.

Ben Gray/bgray@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Frankey Kocher of McDonough rinses her mop as she and daughter Shannen clean a house. Kocher, who owns the business Partners in Grime, gets applications from people who have lost jobs or need more income. She has to turn most away.

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College Park resident Frank Williams makes $11.50-an-hour leasing apartments, well below the $65,000-a year the former executive earned before he was laid off last year from EarthLink.

Welcome to today's job market, where workers are having to make tough decisions to survive in an economy that's devoured 438,000 in the first half of this year alone.

"It's a Darwinian job market. You take what you can get," said Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond. "They're downshifting ... and taking jobs paying less money because they can't find anything else."

In his nine years as labor commissioner, Thurmond said he hasn't seen a job market as rough as this one.

"It's tougher than post-9/11," he said. "This is much more difficult, primarily due to inflation being fueled by higher gas prices."

And the worst is yet to come, many economists say, with unemployment likely to increase in the coming months as the housing, credit and fuel crises continue to pound the economy.

Here in Georgia, more people than ever are out of work, and it's taking them longer to find jobs. Many workers in hard-hit industries have taken pay cuts just to hold on to their jobs. Others are trying to squeeze more overtime out of their jobs while some are taking on additional full-time jobs on the side or stringing together part-time jobs to make ends meet. (The number of American workers who see their part-time job as a necessity is at a 14-year high.)

"The first job pays the bills. The second job puts food on the table," said Mahoney, an operations coordinator at Delta and sales clerk at Lowe's.

The pay cuts at Delta shaved his pay to about $40,000 a year, from "well over $50,000 a year," Mahoney said. He earns about $1,000 a month working part-time at Lowe's.

Cleaning firms, book stores, security firms, big-box retailers and the like have seen a spike in job applications in recent months, some from well-educated, white-collar workers. And many workers of all educational and economic levels are doing jobs they never dreamed they'd be doing.

"We're seeing a lot of people with master's degrees and post-grad work who've come in recently saying, 'I need to find something. I'm out here looking, and I'm not finding anything,' " said Loma Jamil, a manager at Magic City. The Atlanta adult nightclub averages 100 job applications a week for bartenders, waitresses and dancers.

"The flexible hours really help people in those situations," she said.

'Two steps back to get ahead'

While these jobs afford workers flexibility and the ability to make extra money, many workers arrive at their decision after a lot of

trepidation. Some work their

jobs in secret, afraid family and friends wouldn't understand. For people like Kelly, it's about survival.

"I had to make a choice," said Kelly, a single mother of two who went to work last month as a dancer at Magic City. "I prayed about it. It wasn't something I would choose to do or am used to doing. But I had to do something. I have bills."

The mortgage on the five-bedroom home she bought in Fairburn last fall beckons. And her Infiniti truck takes $100 of gas to fill up.

Kelly is considering asking co-workers at Magic City to carpool to cut costs.

"So many people around me are losing everything. House. Cars. They had perfect credit and now their credit is bad," said Kelly, 34.

For her, dancing "helps keep the lights on, gas in the cars. My [oldest] daughter's about to go to college. I'm a single parent. I want to make sure she goes to school and focuses on her books."

On good nights, Kelly pulls in $1,000. Even the off nights yield $400, the amount some people earn in a week.

"It's been a blessing to me and helped me get caught back up with bills I was getting behind on," she said.

Kitti McCreary also went to work at Magic City last week as a waitress after calls dried up for her services as a makeup artist, at which she made about $45,000 last year. That's been cut in half this year, she said.

She tried waitressing at other clubs, but the tips didn't come close to the $200 in tips she made her first night at Magic City. She works with her clothes on.

"To be honest, I didn't think I'd be working at a strip club," said the 38-year-old mother who is trying to put money aside for her 16-year-old son's college fund. "I wouldn't have fathomed it a year ago."

"Sometimes you have to take two steps back to get ahead," said Williams, a single dad who is raising his sons on the money he earns leasing apartments after losing his EarthLink job.

A different kind of applicant

Cleaning giant Merry Maids has seen a lot more male applicants than usual, said spokeswoman Sonia Alexanderhill.

And whenever Karen Ritscher puts out feelers to drum up business for her Kennesaw cleaning firm, A Clean House, she's deluged with job applications.

"It's interesting," Ritscher said. "When there are tons of jobs, you still get calls, but their work history isn't as strong. Now that the economy's changed, you see people with pretty substantial work histories where they take steps down in their career. They have a work history they want to protect."

Ritscher recently hired a laid-off Delta flight attendant and a real estate agent looking to supplement the drop in her income.

Job-hunting conditions have gotten so tough that "I've had people going out to our cars and say 'y'all hiring'?" said Frankey Kocher, who owns a McDonough cleaning business called Partners in Grime.

Kocher and Ritscher end up turning most people away because business is slow.

Government agencies like the state labor department's career centers also have noticed the influx of workers going into jobs they wouldn't normally take. Many of them, officials said, are coming out of the manufacturing and mortgage industries.

Interestingly, the shift in the type of work people are willing to do points to what University of Maryland economist Peter Morici calls a "middle-class recession."

So far, he said, "we have a low-grade recession. The jobs are coming out of manufacturing, construction, banking. Not cleaning services and fast food. Lower-end industries aren't shedding jobs, yet."

THE UNEMPLOYED

• Unemployed Georgians: 285,000 as of May — largest number ever recorded by state labor department.

• Estimated number of Georgians who've exhausted their unemployment benefits: 140,000

• Americans working part time because they can't find full-time work: 5.4 million — 14-year high.

• Duration of job search

In Georgia: 11.4 weeks as of May 2008

A year ago: 11.1 weeks as of May 2007

In the U.S.: 15.3 weeks

A year ago: 15.1 weeks

Sources: Georgia Department of Labor; National Employment Law Project.