See, the thing about unemployment is...

For the first time in my life I have collected an unemployment check. See, the place I work at has kept cutting people, cutting people, cutting people trying to stay afloat. Well, instead of cutting even more people, they got approved for the "work share" program or some such thing through the State of Oregon whereby if, instead of laying off more people, they cut back x number of people to 32 hours, we would then get unemployment for the other 8 hours. That way it helps keep people employed with a reasonable paycheck.

Okay, fair enough. Of course, since on the 32 hours I am still having unemployment insurance withdrawn...and then getting unemployment paid...I think you see where I am going with this. Kind of reminds me of a comment Scott* once made. 

He went to see some government leech...er, worker or other. And in the course of the conversation, he asked said worker how they got paid. The answer was, "From tax money."

Scott: "And do you pay taxes?"

Leech: "Yes."

Scott: "So you are paying yourself?"

Yes, I thought it was funny. Good thing, because we are about to plunge into very unfunny territory.

See, one of the guys I work with got totally screwed by it. He is a pretty good guy. He works hard, he works long, he gets the job done. Away from work he is a good guy too. He is trying real hard to be a good father. He sacrifices to make sure he can take as good of care as possible of his kids. He scrimps and saves, he works the dirt shift because it pays...well, paid...more and so forth. 

As part of being a good guy, the last two weeks he worked over 32 hours because otherwise the job wouldn't get done. 

We believed it was like normal unemployment; if you work part time, they take dollar for dollar for the amount you made more than the amount you would have if not working.

Wrong. 

See, on work share, apparently they did not approve us for THAT scenario. No, they approved us for 24 to 32 hours apiece...they just did not tell us that. So by working MORE than 32 hours, he thus was disqualified for those weeks from the program and got zip, zero, nada from unemployment.

Ironically, had he worked LESS he would have gotten more money. Yeah, nice thinking government jackasses. You are doing such a fine job, why don't you vote yourselves another pay raise?

Frankly, we have too much work to get done in 32 hours apiece but not enough for 40 hours. Had we kept one more guy it would have cost the government more money but we could have got everything done in the allotted time. How stupid is that?

Yes, way to go, government. Penalize people for doing the right thing. There is a reason I am against expanding government involvement in ANYTHING, and that includes unemployment, welfare, health care, regulation, and so forth. All they do is mess things up for good people. 

*Scott was the brother of the first girl I ever dated.