When I was first starting my working life as a lowly corn picker in the countryside of Ohio, I got paid under the table. I’d work twenty hours a week, get a dismal amount of money that in no way justified waking up so early, and spend my money on comic books and music. Since I wasn’t legally employed, as I was underage, I couldn’t complain about the terrible conditions of the job anyway. I’d like to never been in that situation again.
The last job I got paid for in cash was my first job in Korea. My boss would "total" my utilities, stealing about four hundred dollars a month, give me a huge stack of cash, and send me away. I was fresh faced, never got a real salary before, and didn’t know any better than to spend what money he did give me. Eventually I got a bank account set up and started to actually save some money, since the temptation to go on a shopping spree is reduced when you don’t have your monthly wage sitting in your apartment at all times.
Today our manager came into the teachers room with a fat bag of money for us. He had owed us money for bonuses, for overtime, and also it was our payday. For some reason, the upper management had gone to Seoul, and wasn’t able to authorize the transfer for us. Oddly enough, he could still withdraw a large enough amount to pay us, but couldn’t send it to us automatically. We all expected to get paid via electronic transfer, but he had the cash in hand, counted out and waiting for us to check. Since the largest Korean denomination is only around $10 USD, a month’s worth of pay is a large pile of money. It makes you feel much richer than you really are.
We all counted our money, and while we got paid our whole salary, we had no deductions taken out for things like the Korean pension or the medical insurance provided by the school. While normally this would be a good thing, the school would just take twice as much some other month, or we’d be without insurance until they figured out this accounting mistake. This is not a good thing. We told our manager about the problem, and he took out money back to deduct the items. It’s hard to hand back that much cash when you know you’ll get less back in return, but there would be too many headaches otherwise. It’s best we all decided to be honest about what happened and turned it in before someone was able to spend or lose some of it.
