Unpaid federal workers may be key to ending government shutdown

Working without pay, federal employees calling out amid the government shutdown could play a role in ending it.

With the federal government shutdown heading into its third week and no end in sight, unpaid government employees may be the key to reopening. 

This shutdown is currently the second longest shutdown in US history. In 2019, federal aviation workers, air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees helped end the country’s longest shutdown when they stopped showing up to work and started calling out sick. 

“ What happened during that 35-day shutdown is people got exhausted, they started calling off because they ran out of money to keep coming to work to put gas in their cars,” Philip Glover, District 3 National Vice President with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), told reporters during a press conference earlier this month. 

“We tried to help them – the unions try to help – but the fact is they get to the point, they’re like, ‘I cannot afford to come into work,’ and so they start to call off work. Same with the air traffic controllers, who are not part of our union, but that’s what happened last time.”

There are 66,000 federal employees living in Pennsylvania and AFGE represents at least 31,000 of them. According to Glover, there are roughly 10,000 federal workers receiving their paychecks through funding streams that aren’t appropriated by the federal government, while the rest are furloughed or being forced to work without pay.  

“We have about 1,100 TSA workers across Pennsylvania. They’re all ordered to work with no pay,” Glover said. “Bureau of Prisons, I have about 2,500 of them that are working in nine federal prisons across the state without pay.  We’ve got eight Veterans Affairs hospitals that are somewhere around 12,000 [members] that are just working without pay.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that travel disruptions may begin as the country’s air traffic controllers and TSA guards stop receiving their paychecks. 

“They got a partial paycheck a week ago Tuesday. Their next paycheck comes a week from Tuesday. In that paycheck there will be no dollars. They don’t get paid,” Duffy told Fox and Friends on Monday. “[W]e have heard they are taking Uber jobs. They are doing DoorDash, they are [finding] ways to keep their families afloat.”

US Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Philadelphia) believes that President Donald Trump will back down and reverse course the longer the shutdown carries on. 

“The last time we had a government shutdown, it was the longest in American history. Of course, Donald Trump was also president, because this dysfunction tends to happen when Donald Trump is in the White House and  when Republicans control at least one body of Congress, ” Boyle told The Keystone in an interview. 

“What we saw is that he ultimately backed down. A lot of times the press acts like Donald Trump is invincible, he’s incredibly strong. It’s total bullshit. The reality is Donald Trump backs down often. The reason why that 35 day government shutdown ended before is because Trump pulled a 180 and completely gave up.”