When you “work black” over here in Germany you’re working without paying any of those ridiculously high German Abgaben (taxes, social security and pension costs and who knows what else). You know, instead of hiring a painter to paint your apartment and give you a proper bill, you hire him or somebody else on the side and pay half?

Well, every once in a while German government and media types pretend like this is a bad thing and get upset for a few days and talk about how, this time, for example, 30 billion Euros in revenue is being funneled away from the state due to this dreadfully immoral Schwarzarbeit (black work) stuff and everyone should stop doing it right now this minute honest and seriously we really mean it this time, folks. You know, be better people and all that?

The problem is that nobody here will even consider stopping hiring and working black, not as long as the German state isn’t prepared to reduce these high Abgaben of theirs, at least when it comes to work like this. And a reduction like this, of course, as everybody knows, is out of the question. Why, nobody knows. It just is.

A third of all Germans employ people this way, according to a recent survey. And the interesting thing, I find, is just who is doing the hiring. Some 39 percent of those hiring Schwarzarbeiter are retirees. The next biggist group with 28 percent is the childless DINK couple kind of people kind of group. But apparently only 18 percent of families with kids have the money to cheat the government out of, well, the money. They’ve given it all up by already having paid those Abgaben somewhere else, it seems.

„Allerdings plagt vier von fünf Bundesbürgern laut Umfrage keinerlei schlechtes Gewissen, wenn sie Schwarzarbeiter beschäftigen.“