I’d been wondering lately what Mortimer was up to. Since being laid off at the end of February, he’d only managed to go on one interview. I tried to hook him up with a job at my company that would have been perfect, but the position ended up being down-graded and they thought he was overqualified and didn’t even interview him beyond an introductory phone call with an HR person. In our last couple of emails, he was being a little evasive about whether he had any more job leads and I was starting to worry that he was in total denial about his situation.
But we had dinner last night, and the good news is that he’s been working for about a week! The bad news is that it’s a temporary project… and he’s being paid under the table. This is totally dicey, of course. He’s still collecting unemployment, but the weekly payment is particularly low in New York, so this extra money really helps. He just had to renew his lease, which meant his rent went up by about $100, to $1,250, I think. His health insurance is about $250 a month– weirdly, it’s now less than it cost him when he was employed, thanks to the COBRA changes that were part of the stimulus package.
It’s interesting to see these government policies at work in a way that directly affects someone I’m close to– sometimes it’s too easy to see government spending as this big waste that just goes straight into the hands of corrupt administrators or the stereotypical welfare cheat who’s sitting around watching TV while the checks roll in. On the one hand, what Mortimer’s doing isn’t exactly ethical– he’s definitely gaming the system. But on the other hand, he wants to work and has been trying to find a job. He found a situation where someone could afford to pay him for a little while, but knowing the future of it was uncertain, they wanted him to be able to keep collecting unemployment benefits (I think he is getting even less than the maximum of $430 per week). If Mortimer gets the chance to take a real full-time job, he’ll happily do it, so I can’t really blame him for what he’s doing to make ends meet in the meantime. (FYI, of the 30 other people who were laid off with Mortimer, he said only 6 have found jobs.)
Have you ever been paid under the table? Would you do what Mortimer’s doing?
