Why Working for Pennies (or Less) Pays Off

Pop quiz: Say you, like another 9.7 percent of Americans, find yourself unemployed.

Are you better off spending that extra 40 (plus!) hours per week: A.) blitzing out resumes, taking care of your health and home with more time for sleep and chores, or B.) doing those same tasks that used to pay you $20k, $40k, $100k each year for ... nothing?

Demeaning though the prospect may initially seem, a column at Science makes a compelling argument for emphasizing option B.

While you can't find a job without looking for one, devoting all of your energies to a hunt that may, in today's economy, stretch months longer than in more prosperous times, is a recipe for heartache and missed opportunities.

Putting a portion of that time instead toward "volunteering" your old services, whether they involved investment analysis or market research, social work or teaching, has a couple of benefits. Most importantly, it keeps your own skills sharp and marketable to prospective employers. Expertise is harder to argue after six months of couch surfing (or, for that matter, working odd jobs). But there's also a social value, because the more jobs that get cut, the more extra work is available to be done.

And while lean times don't leave most of us brimming with altruism, the fact is that volunteering (for your old employer or otherwise), or offering to work as a benefit-free contractor, keeps you in the spotlight for when money for new hires returns.

The Science article's author, Brooke Allen, points to a fantastic infographic the New York Times put together based on the American Time Use Survey. The numbers suggest that few people are doing this. Unemployed and employed people spend a tiny average of just eight minutes per day volunteering. And with regards to statistical bias, given its positive connotations, its worth noting that time spent in this category is probably over-reported. Perhaps even more alarming, the study notes that unemployed people spend just a half an hour a day on the job hunt.

Let's not pretend that volunteering, or working for scale as a contractor, is a long-term solution. Besides the fact that you've got bills, rent and loans to pay, these kinds of efforts won't exactly kick start the economy. BusinessWeek points out that "non-employer businesses," in addition to typically paying meager salaries, don't create new jobs or wealth.

But it's still a better solution than babysitting. Maybe the most convincing case comes from what Allen recalls hearing once from a manager: "I have no problem hiring the unemployed. But I will not hire people who are not working."

Photo credit: r-z