By Chua Mui Hoong, Senior Writer

MY FRIEND arrived first with her charming toddler in tow. Her husband settled the bill with the taxi-driver, whipped out a reporter's notebook, looked at his watch and started scribbling.

'Since when did you become a reporter too?' I joked.

'I'm doing a mystery audit of taxi services,' he said.

'Oh, sure,' I retorted. He was after all an IT professional with advanced degrees whose last job was with a big bank.

My friend assured me he was serious. Times are bad. One contract job had ended prematurely. Several months on, he landed a job offer - only to see it evaporate in the wake of the Lehman Brothers fiasco, when the prospective employer cancelled its plans for Singapore.

Mystery-shopping taxi services not only gave him a fee, it also entitled him and his family to free taxi rides. All he had to do was make detailed notes of the services and evaluate them.

In the last few months, the blond, good-looking six-footer has taken on modelling and voicing roles and acted as an extra. His latest venture: distributing fliers for $5 an hour.

My Singaporean friend's husband may be an ang moh, but his story is by no means unique in Singapore. I know of former high-earners who took on ad hoc projects, or settled for wages that would qualify them for Workfare.

A recent New York Times article put the spotlight on this phenomenon of executives taking on 'survival jobs' as cleaners or data entry clerks in the United States. There, an estimated 1.7 million people were working part-time in January because they could not find full-time work, a 40 per cent jump from December 2007 when the recession began.

In Singapore, the number of those made redundant (retrenched or let go prematurely from contract jobs) jumped to 16,000 last year, compared to 8,500 in 2007. As at December 2008, 73,100 people were unemployed. This quarter, an estimated 10,000 people lost their jobs.

In the 2001 and 2003 downturns, professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs) formed 30 to 36 per cent of those who lost their jobs, so the number now could be 20,000 to 26,000.

These figures capture the numbers who lost their jobs recently and are actively seeking new ones.

But they don't say much about another grim trend: that of people who are under-employed, who want and need full- time jobs but are working only part-time. Ironically, the professionals working in 'survival jobs' - transitional low-paying jobs to pay the bills - will be considered employed, and will not show up in national statistics on joblessness.

Though technically employed, they are no less in need of a job but their situation may fall under the national radar.

Of course this group tends to have more resources than the rank-and-file jobless. But prolonged periods of low pay will dry up savings, erode self-esteem and risk sending them into a spiral down the wage and job ladder.

Professionals who take on 'survival jobs' to pay the bills - like my friend's husband - need community and societal support as they go through an emotional and financial roller-coaster.

There is the humiliation or sheer embarrassment of taking on a job with lower pay and status. Even your wife and family, who should be grateful for your efforts, may not be able to help feeling ashamed of your new role.

Lifestyle adjustments have to be made. Many lose friends and see their social circles narrow as they can no longer afford the hospitality and reciprocity that lubricate social networking. (You stop accepting invitations when you can't afford to return the hospitality.)

It is not easy to maintain hope and optimism in the face of dwindling bank balances, grinding work with little satisfaction, and family anxiety.

Those with grit - and little choice - moderate their egos and expectations and take on a range of jobs to pay the bills, telling themselves the situation is temporary.

But this is the scary bit: sometimes, taking on a survival job erodes your opportunity of getting a good job offer.

You have less time to spend on job searches. You may not be able to receive calls or attend interviews at the time specified by prospective employers. In this job market where applicants outnumber jobs exponentially, a missed phone call or a late reply by e-mail while you are trying to earn an extra $5 an hour, could spell the end of Opportunity.

And as past recessions showed, and as career experts will advise, sometimes settling for lower-paid jobs puts one in a spiral of downward mobility. Among people I know are a couple of men in their 50s who lost their jobs in the mid-1980s recession and went on to a succession of MLM or sales jobs, and never got back on the career escalator.

This is why there is merit in suggestions to give financial support to the jobless in all occupational classes, not just the very poor or the rank-and-file.

As financial planner Leong Sze Hian wrote to The Straits Times Forum page last month, training programmes for PMETs assume that this group have funds to tide them over during their training periods.

What of those who need an income to support their families while going through training, he asked, and suggested an 'adequate stipend' for PMETs who take up training.

In normal times, PMETs who lose their jobs need little help. Many have resources, networks and plenty of initiative to bounce back.

In a prolonged downturn that affects the services sector, many jobless or under-employed PMETs will remain in that situation for a long time - perhaps years.

A helping hand each month to get their families to stay on track financially, could help them stay the course and not start the downward slide to becoming tomorrow's low-wage worker.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.