The threshhold has not changed ina very very long time and it probably should.
I hear you but aren’t there other considerations other than net take home pay in the decision of whether or not to work?
Is your husband’s free time worth anything at all?
I think it also goes beyond the trouble of labor. If you wanted 8-10 hours per day of really physical labor (and for someone who is used to sitting at a desk all day painting and repairing fences would probably qualify) for $10-12 an hour that might be worth it to someone who has bills to pay immediately and doesn’t feel like the time might be better spent looking for a permanent, full time job. If it was this year during what has been the hottest summer in history for much of the country and has set heat records in all 50 states that $10-12 an hour doesn’t look so good anymore, especially when I can do part time work at the air conditioned mall at no less than $7.75 or babysit in an air conditioned home for similar money. And if you are in the US and these people have lost their health insurance along with their jobs they might legitimately have to consider a minor back problem or sensitivity to heat going from a general annoyance not much worth mentioning to several thousand dollars worth of hospital bills over the course of 8-10 hours laboring in the hot sun.
Last year in July we had a sudden move pop up so my husband and I paid a couple of unemployed friends $50 each to pack up boxes for us while we were at work one day and they did it gladly. Had we offered them the same $50 to mow lawns or build a shed or something outdoors in the heat they might have turned us down and I couldn’t blame them for that.
OK. and?
I didn’t imply that, I more or less said it. You spent a lot of time and effort trying to “prove” that there had to be legit reasons for three people to turn down that job by building strawmen right and left. If your actual position is anything other than “but but but, they had reasons”, it was very unclear.
The only thing I didn’t do was go back and dig out, for the second time, what you said. If you had bothered to copy what I’d said it would have been right there. I don’t “engage” with people who insist that I flip back and forth among multiple posts just to figure out what they are saying.
Bye bye. Can I keep the ring?
Apparently, it was OK in 2008. He was getting paid by the county of LA, by check, so even if we wanted to cheat it would have been stupid. As I’ve said, I don’t know anything at all about how unemployment works in California, so it may be because he was getting so much less than his previous salary that he was allowed to have some income without penalty. Or the penalty was so small that we didn’t notice the difference. Anyway, we didn’t know that prior to him taking the job.
This is one of the things that many folks, including brazil84, don’t seem to get. Humans simply cannot spend their whole lives going to work, working, coming home from work, sleeping and starting over. Eventually the poor person is going to crack and start sniping at other drones during rush hour or something. So to set up the strawman that one is not willing to take any work if one turns down a long distance commute to net $5 a day? Yeah… If nothing else, it would probably cost $5 a day to make the commute!
I agree. It’s a combination things – the amount of and nature of the work; uncertainty in the amount of time; length of commute; the personal circumstances of the individual involved; and of course the rate of pay.