Federal workers fed up with paycheck uncertainty surrounding shutdown fights

WASHINGTON — Just days before the height of the holiday season, a government shutdown threatened to throw hundreds of thousands of federal workers into the lurch by putting their paychecks in jeopardy.

President Joe Biden has since signed a short-term spending bill into law, but many employees and contractors fumed that Congress brought the government to the brink of another funding lapse and created financial uncertainty for the federal workforce.

During a shutdown, most government workers are furloughed, though many are required to report to work if their job is considered essential. In both cases, employees receive back pay when the shutdown ends, but new paychecks aren’t generated if a spending bill isn’t signed into law.

“While retroactive pay is guaranteed by law, bills, rent and other financial obligations don’t wait, which forces families to make a difficult choice during these holiday seasons,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) union, in an interview shortly before Congress passed the funding bill on Friday.

Paychecks for work earlier in December would not have been delayed by a shutdown, according to guidance from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. However, paychecks reflecting work from the second half of the month could have been impacted depending on the duration of a shutdown.

Members of Congress continue to be paid without interruption during a shutdown.

During funding lapses in 2018 and 2019, about 800,000 government employees were furloughed or worked without pay. In 2013, around 850,000 people were furloughed daily during the peak of that year’s shutdown.

In the hours before Congress passed the funding bill Friday, Johnny Jones, a Transportation Security Administration officer at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, talked about how his colleagues were trying to determine the impact of a shutdown on their holiday finances.

“The majority of our rank-and-file live paycheck-to-paycheck. But it’s the holidays, so these guys have already spent their savings buying Christmas gifts,” said Jones, who is also an AFGE union official. “The politicians are going to be the real Grinches around here.”

Jones said that members of his union were considering returning or pawning holiday gifts in order to have enough money to last through a potential shutdown.

He expressed anger toward President-elect Donald Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who together effectively killed the initial 1,500-page bipartisan funding bill that would have kept the federal government funded through the middle of March. (Trump and Musk got behind a revised version of the bill, but it was rejected in the House on Thursday night.)

“The whole workforce was anticipating there would be funding that lasts for the first few months of the year,” Jones said. “Then, next thing you know, Trump and Elon Musk are controlling our lives.”

Joe Shuker, a 66-year-old AFGE union official and TSA officer at Philadelphia International Airport, said that he and his colleagues missed multiple paychecks during the 2018-19 shutdown.

“We had guys going to food banks after they missed that first check,” he said ahead of congressional passage of the short-term spending bill. “If you’re a 26-year-old guy with kids, a mortgage, car payments — they were struggling, and food was number one on the list. They had to choose between putting gas in the car and putting food on the table.”

Shuker added that the shutdown standoff in Washington had added stress to an already high-stakes job.

“We look for bombs for a living. It’s stressful enough,” he said. “If you’ve got an employee worried about feeding their kids and how they’re going to get to work the next day — it’s a lot.”

Federal employees who were furloughed or required to work are paid retroactively, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Employees have previously received pay retroactively, and Congress passed a bill in 2019 ensuring that furloughed employees get back pay in the future as well.

Federal contractors, however, are treated differently. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, federal contractors often do not receive back pay.

“It’s really a dark day when an unelected billionaire like Elon Musk is able to tank a negotiated agreement at the eleventh hour, frankly, playing games with the livelihoods of hard working people like our members in the federal buildings,” said Jaime Contreras, executive vice president of 32BJ SEIU, whose members include government contractors in the Washington, D.C., area.

Contreras said his union represents around 2,400 federally contracted workers, including security officers, cleaners and food service workers. During previous government shutdowns, he said, many of the members did not get paid.

“They have been loyal workers in the federal government, and this is just not a way for us to treat [them], whether they’re government employees or contracted government employees,” Contreras said before Friday’s votes. “It’s just plain and simple wrong.”

Bonita Williams, a federally contracted cleaner at the State Department for 18 years, had anticipated before the funding bill passed that securing food would be the hardest part of enduring another shutdown.

Williams, 62, has five children and 13 grandchildren. She said all of her children also work for the federal government, and during a previous shutdown they went to a food bank, which once ran out of provisions in their time of need.

“I’m mad because it ain’t gonna be no holiday, because you have to save your money because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Williams said when Congress was still scrambling to pass a spending bill. “You’ve got to think about, do you want to buy food? Or do you want to buy Christmas gifts for your grandkids?”

“I’d rather see them with food on the table,” she said.

Megan Lebowitz reported from Washington, D.C., and Daniel Arkin from New York City.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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