Over the past two weeks, much media coverage has been devoted to the politicians in Washington, while far less time was spent discussing the ramifications the shutdown had on the lives of furloughed federal workers. The people who work for non-essential segments of the federal government are working to put food on the table and take care of their kids like any other individuals working in the private sector. So while it’s easy to chuckle and point out that life went mostly unchanged in the partial shutdown, there were people immediately affected by it.
In an ideal situation, there would be enough private sector jobs to absorb the number of people employed in the unnecessary parts of federal government. It’s tempting to look at an index of government positions and cross out all of the extraneous agencies and departments. However, while the economy isn’t all bad, it’s pretty plain that there are simply not enough available jobs for this to be feasible.
Furloughed federal workers will receive retroactive pay, but not until the government reopened of course. Until then, there was no paycheck coming in.
This had some Capitol Hill workers fretting over making various payments if the shutdown kept dragging on. It’s likely that many federal workers would have “[fou]nd themselves in a serious financial bind if they miss[ed] two paychecks.” There are those who had retroactive pay coming, but still could not afford to put food on the table, as they were already living paycheck to paycheck.
