Unpaid government workers can't afford gas to get to work

Jan. 22, 2019
Day 32 of the partial government shutdown.

https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2019/01/19/some-tsa-workers-cannot-afford-to-get-to-work-during-partial-government-shutdown-getting-donated-food

Some TSA Workers are Relying on Donated Food During the Government Shutdown
By Michael Herzenberg Queens
PUBLISHED 10:11 PM ET Jan. 18, 2019

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The single mother from Canarsie says she's doing whatever she can to put food on the table now that she's not getting paid because of the partial government shutdown.

"Food banks, local pantries, anything that will help," she said.

On this day, her union filled a U-Haul with groceries to guarantee all 2,000 TSA workers at JFK Airport have food for the weekend.

"It's very helpful," TSA Officer Marco Cebie said. "Oh my God, it's hard. You have got to budget, you have go to find out how you're going to pay the bills, you have rent."

TSA officers make between $35,000 and $43,000 a year. They haven't been paid since December.

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They also have to stay healthy and come to work or they can lose their jobs during the shutdown. But that's becoming more and more difficult for many.

On some days, the number of TSA agents calling out sick is more than twice the normal rate:

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"It's not that they're calling out sick. It's a financial issue," TSA National Union President Hydrick Thomas told NY1. He explains that some of his 45,000 members can't afford gas or make their car payments now.

Thomas wants to know what the government expects people to do. He said he asked the TSA to help with his members' transportation costs, but the union was still waiting for an answer. Thomas warns that things will only get worse for the workers and the flying public.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/15/essence-involuntary-servitude-federal-unions-sue-trump-administration-get-paid-shutdown-work/?utm_term=.f353569d8954

By Ann E. Marimow, Deanna Paul, Katie Zezima and Spencer S. Hsu
January 15, 2019

A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday refused to force the government to pay federal employees who have been working without compensation during the partial government shutdown, rejecting arguments from labor unions that unpaid work violates labor laws and the Constitution.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said it would be “profoundly irresponsible” for him to issue an order that would result in thousands of federal employees staying home from work and not doing their jobs.

"At best it would create chaos and confusion,” Leon said. “At worst it could be catastrophic . . . I’m not going to put people’s lives at risk.”

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Unionized employees have had to work without pay during the shutdown at agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, the Agriculture Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission.

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As an example, the unions said Tuesday after the ruling that the IRS plans to end furlough for more than half of its workforce to prepare for tax filing season, meaning as many as 46,000 IRS employees could be forced to go to work with no pay while the shutdown continues. Up to 2,200 aviation safety inspectors with the Federal Aviation Administration are expected to be recalled by the end of the week and 500 FDA workers have been recalled to work and will be unpaid until the shutdown ends, among others.

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Federal workers already have suffered “immeasurable losses,” the plaintiffs alleged, including being unable to pay for medical treatment or travel to funerals for family members; some have jeopardized their security clearances by missing court-ordered alimony payments, and others have failed to make loan repayments, incurring penalties.

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“We want to send the message: Stop the shutdown,” Burakiewicz said. More than 5,000 people have emailed her law firm seeking to join the complaint or offering support, and she said they often hint at panic: “ ‘I’ve got 3 kids, I’ve got $200 left, and I can’t afford to keep working because I’m not getting paid.’ It breaks my heart.”

Richard Heldreth, a member of the American Federation of Government Employees, has worked in federal prisons since 1997, drawn to the work for the job security, good salary and benefits. But he and his colleagues at United States Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia have been working without pay since the government shut down on Dec. 22, sapping morale and leading to an uptick in violent incidents, he said.

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Heldreth, president of the Local 420 union in West Virginia, was a plaintiff in the 2013 lawsuit. He said more than 60 employees called out sick at the prison on Saturday, exacerbating tensions among the staff and inmates, and there were four violent incidents in a four-day period. The prison is a remote maximum-security facility where three inmates, including the notorious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, were killed last year.

“There’s frustration because it causes division among the staff,” he said. “The ones that are going on are mad because the others called off, but the ones who called off, some of them live hours away and can’t afford the gas or child care. Some have medical issues they can’t afford right now. There’s a lot of desperation.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/us/politics/government-shutdown-update.html


By Matthew Haag and Niraj Chokshi
Jan. 21, 2019

Updated Jan. 22
Day 32: What’s been happening?

It has been a month since the first day of the government shutdown.

Furloughed federal employees have started part-time jobs with delivery and ride-hailing apps and applied for other opportunities, such as yoga-instructor positions, to try to make ends meet without a government paycheck.

Some of the most vulnerable Americans — including the homeless, the elderly and people one crisis away from the streets — are feeling the burden. Without payments from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, nonprofit groups that support low-income renters are also struggling. Many other social safety net programs are facing similar crises.

As a bone-chilling flash freeze swept through the Midwest and Northeast over the holiday weekend, hundreds of thousands of federal workers remain furloughed, and some continued to work without pay, including forecasters at the National Weather Service. Veterans of the emergency management field are worried about longer-term trouble, too

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When it began, the shutdown left about 800,000 federal workers without pay, with just over half continuing to work, including members of the Coast Guard and food safety inspectors. The number of people working has grown as the Trump administration reinterprets longstanding rules, often to the benefit of the president’s base.

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an irony of the shutdown: Federal jobs have long been seen as being among the most stable, even though now they are anything but.

Federal courts, which have been open and operating despite the shutdown, could be close to running out of money. Some courts have delayed civil cases, and court-appointed lawyers have not been paid at all.

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Low-income Americans whose leases are subsidized by the government are worried about their rent because the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is closed, cannot make payments to landlords.

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Legions of contractors are out of work and, unlike federal employees working without pay, they have no expectation of recovering the missed wages.

For American farmers, the shutdown has compounded concerns about Mr. Trump’s trade war with China. To ease their pain, the president created a $12 billion bailout fund, but that is frozen because of the shutdown. Last week, the Agriculture Department said that it would temporarily call back about 2,500 workers to help farmers and ranchers with existing loans and to provide them with necessary tax documents.

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