Working Again (Temporarily)

A couple of months ago I decided to swallow my pride and signed up with a number of agencies for temporary (or contract) attorney work. I didn't realize that I had "pride" about my law firm career until my first assignment, which was doing document review at a large law firm's offices for about a week last December. The firm was similar to the ones I used to work at; more prestigious than my most recent (now dissolved, bankrupt, kaput) employer, but smaller than Allen & Overy. Contract attorneys are pretty low in the pecking order when it comes to New York lawyers. This was fairly obvious from my interviews at the agencies, where I was told that "people don't like to hire people like you to do this kind of work." This kind of work means reviewing hundreds of documents online and coding them as "relevant" or "not relevant" for an ongoing litigation or securities investigation. A very well-trained monkey could do it, which, in itself, does not necessarily distinguish this work from the work of big law firm associates. The pay is not too bad (for a regular assignment 35-40 dollars an hour, for the foreign language document reviews I actually was planning to do it's more like 50-60), probably even marginally better than what your hourly pay would be in a really terrible month (i.e. 300 hours and up) at a law firm.

The difference is how you are being treated. As a temp attorney you are hired help: the nice people treat you politely and say thank you; the mean people are obnoxious and condescending; either way, it is understood that you belong to a different class. And this bothered me because I have worked at these places (which none of the other temp attorneys on that assignment had done). I felt that being treated as a second-class citizen by an institution (the large law firm) that I am (sadly) so familiar with and have so little respect for was just too much. Or rather: too little. I did meet a very nice and interesting girl during that assignment and I found out that this whole world of New York contract attorneys is something I never knew existed (they have their blogs, which tell tales of sweatshop conditions in awful doc review hangars, techniques for getting assignments, milking the assignments for what they are worth, agency misbehavior and blackballing, etc.). So in the end, it was an interesting social experience and I learned something about myself.

I am now working on a different kind of temporary assignment. This is in-house at a bank and it pays much better and I will describe it when I have been there longer (I completed my first week today).

Shameful

There is something called COBRA (short for: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act), which, according to the law gives "workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances." This is supposed to be a safety net in a country where people are not entitled to being able to see a doctor if they need it (which, after all these years here, still amazes me), but of course, in most cases, it doesn't. The group health rate is incredibly expensive and I am pretty sure that most people who make an average salary cannot afford to pay even the COBRA so when they lose their jobs they just fall back on emergency room care, which in turn drives up premiums, which make COBRA unaffordable - get the vicious circle? I am lucky enough to have made enough money in the past two years so that I have enough savings to buy my family health care for $1,355 a month. (As a comparison, if I tried to get the same quality health insurance as an individual for my family, it would have cost over 2,000 dollars).

Now my law firm has gone bankrupt and the people who drove it into bankruptcy by their terrible business decisions to put all eggs in one supremely lucrative, but tenuous basket, have joined another firm and are continuing to make a lot of money. This means that COBRA will likely not survive much longer (they can't say how much longer it still would), which makes it difficult to plan for my family and to add insult to injury they have informed me in a letter Fedex-ed to me on January 31 that, as of December 31, I have to pay an extra 300 dollars. Retroactively. I have spoken with the people in charge of benefits on a number of occasions between December and now and never have they mentioned this. To state the obvious, this is a shitty way to treat your now unemployed former employees. Meanwhile, the managing partner (who managed the firm into he ground) and his buddies are still enjoying their substantial fortuned and (old-)new jobs, which provide them health insurance and job security.

We will just get health insurance in another way. I feel insecure and screwed over, but more poignantly, my own woes give me an insight into what millions, who are less well off and less educated than I am have to face. They are unable to afford healthcare and run the risk of bankrupting their families because of this inefficient and unfair healthcare system as soon as they lose their jobs. I can very well imagine the stresses they experience day after day. The system is shameful. Shameful is the word of the day.