With the top two Republican members of the federal government holding federal employees’ livelihoods hostage and a Tuesday ruling by a George W. Bush-appointed judge telling them that they can’t stop working for free, one Michigan federal employee has a message for Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “I can’t afford to work for an IOU.”
That message will be delivered in person at 12 PM Friday in a protest by members of the American Federation of Government Employees in front of the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building in Detroit, Michigan.
Approximately 800,000 federal workers are in effect being held hostage by Trump and McConnell. Of them, almost half have been forced to work for free since the partial federal shutdown began on Dec. 22 because Congress refused to fund Donald Trump’s dream of a wall along the southern border. In Michigan, roughly 6,300 workers have been either furloughed or forced to work for free.
The situation is dire enough that worker advocates, including Barbara Ehrenreich, are urging TSA workers in particular to strike. That’s a move that would be in violation of a 1947 federal law passed long before the Republican Party started shutting down the government in retaliation for losing policy arguments.
That law was upheld in federal court on Tuesday by District Court Judge Richard J. Leon, who said that allowing unpaid federal workers to stop working would “put lives at risk,” according to an Associated Press report on the decision. In his ruling, Judge Leon refused to issue either a temporary restraining order forcing the Trump administration to pay the employees or an order allowing them to refuse to work unless they are paid.
On the same day, The Hill reported that Senate Republicans had blocked another House-passed effort to reopen the government and start paying federal employees, and the Trump administration ordered 36,000 furloughed IRS workers to report back to the office without pay.
While that court case and the overall shutdown drag on with no end in sight, federal and non-federal workers across the country alike will continue to suffer.
Tim Mach, a member of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists Union, works to ensure the safety of aircraft for the Federal Aviation Administration. Mach is one of the “essential” employees who have been forced to work for free during the shutdown. According to Mach, the stress of working without pay isn’t just a hardship for his and other families—it’s also a safety issue
“We’re safety professionals,” he said in an interview with Daily Kos. “We need to be focused on the job at hand, and having these other stresses—from how am I going to feed my family to how will I put gas in the tank or pay for day care—is weighing on people’s minds and distracting them from our mission of ensuring aviation safety.” Speaking of his own situation, Mach said that he recently had to sit down and start figuring out “how long I can do this.” Mach stressed that he loves his job, and “I love serving the American people … but I can’t work for an IOU and feed my family.”
Stephanie Perkins, a furloughed mediator with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said that managers at the Detroit field office are among the workers being forced to work for free so that privately employed workers who have complaints about unfair labor practices can file with the agency before their statute of limitations runs out. But, Perkins added, those complaints aren’t being processed.
“The managers are very frustrated,” Perkins said. “Remember they’re paying commuting costs, wear and tear on their vehicles, and as federal employees we have to pay to park, and then they have to do all this work without any help from the rest of us.” She added that, as a result of chronic staffing shortages, her office was already struggling to serve the entire state of Michigan and 15 Ohio counties with only 17 investigators. With the shutdown in effect, she said, workers coming to her office needing justice “are not getting it at all.”
While workers who are direct government employees will eventually be reimbursed for the weeks they’ve been either furloughed or forced to work without a paycheck, the same can’t be said for furloughed federal contractors. Neither the staffing agencies nor the employees they’ve hired will see a penny of the money they’re losing during the shutdown. According to a Wednesday report by Vox about an attempt by Congress to remedy the situation, Trump’s temper tantrum has left roughly half a million federal contract employees in a permanent financial lurch.
Concern about the shutdown’s effects on the wider economy isn’t just coming from federal workers and contractors. On Tuesday, the Trump administration doubled its estimate of the negative impact his shutdown is having on the country’s economic growth, from 0.1 percent every two weeks to 0.1 percent a week, according to a report by CNBC.
While the shutdown is causing short- and medium-term damage to federal workers and the overall economy, it may well be doing a good deal to serve a longtime Republican goal: strangling the federal government. “I was just talking to a couple of my furloughed co-workers, and one of the things we talked about is that there’s no point in staying” as government employees, said Perkins, who added it’s hard to justify remaining with an employer while being faced with “the uncertainty and constant threat of being put on the street over issues that no federal employee has any control over.”
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.