Lessons everyone can learn from the shutdown – Twin Cities

By Rick VanderKnyff, NerdWallet

Many of us live paycheck to paycheck, as a wide range of surveys confirm.

So when those paychecks suddenly stop coming, because of a layoff or other unforeseen event, the effect can be profound and immediate. How do you pay for the basics — food, shelter, child care and more — with no money coming in, especially if you haven’t been able to build an adequate emergency fund?

Virtually all of the nation’s nearly 3 million federal workers are facing life without pay for the foreseeable future as the federal government shutdown (which began Oct. 1) slogs through its third week.

And it’s not just federal employees living with disruption and uncertainty: The livelihoods of an estimated 3 million contractors also depend on federal dollars. Although work continues, for now, on many contracts that had already been funded before Oct. 1, effects of the shutdown are beginning to ripple through the contract sector, with hours trimmed and other measures reported.

As the shutdown drags on, and millions of financially strapped families cut back on spending, effects are bound to spread into an already uncertain economy and an anemic labor market.

For those of us outside the federal workforce, effects of the shutdown may be mostly indirect for now — an understaffed national park, slow government processes. But the experience of federal workers can serve as a reminder to review our own readiness for future financial disruption.

For federal workers and their families, the reality is here and now. If you’re a federal employee affected by the shutdown, we’ve listed some resources below.

Who works for the federal government?

It can be easy to imagine that most federal employees work behind a desk somewhere in the Washington D.C. area. The reality is far different.

“There are a lot of times you see in the media this nasty word, ‘bureaucrat,’ and a kind of a notion that people are very highly paid, and that’s just not true for the majority of our membership,” says Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 federal and D.C. workers across the U.S. and beyond.

“Our members are working in VA hospitals. They’re working in federal prisons,” Simon says. “There are people in the Department of Labor who are doing site visits to workplaces to make sure OSHA standards are being met.”

Robyn Kehoe, executive director of the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund, offers a similar perspective. “I do think that there’s sometimes a perception that ‘federal employees’ means people at a higher income level making policy decisions, rather than people who are sort of in the trenches doing the work that needs to be done to keep the government going,” Kehoe says. The FEEA is a national nonprofit that, among other things, works to support federal and postal employees in need.

“It’s a wide variety of people, and they’re all across the country,” says Kehoe, who adds that 85% of them live outside the D.C. area.

What happens to federal employees during a shutdown?

Some of these workers are deemed “essential” and are still working every day. Others are “furloughed” — waiting at home for the end of a political stalemate that shows no signs of ending soon.

Virtually all of them are now living without pay. Federal pay cycles vary, but most federal employees received a partial check in the last week, one that pays for work only through Sept. 30. It may be the last check they get for a while.