An issue so far not openly addressed in this “Partial Shutdown” situation is that those who have been deemed to be “essential,” are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay. I really do not know the law that says that these people must work without being paid within a reasonable time period of their work, but my basic view of this is that people being forced to work without being paid in a clearly established time period are slaves. And this is the status of those US federal workers now being forced to work without pay. They are slaves.
A ludicrous effort by Trump to minimize the damage of his idiotic partial shutdown has been his sporadic efforts to deal with consequences of his worthless shutdown. So, we have rich cronies of his who have found themselves inconvenienced for hunting in US natural preserves. Trump has ordered that the federal employees who oversee this particular matter must show up for work to make sure that this handful of wealthy Trump cronies can hunt in US natural preserves, without pay. These federal employees must be slaves to these spoiled brat pals of Trump.
We must recognize what is going on here, although nobody prior to me now has called it for what it is, this is slavery. Trump has been ordering all sorts of fed employees to show up and perform their duties without pay as an accumulating pile of interests get to him complaining about not getting their government services.
Of course, slavery leads to shirking, unless Massa wields a whip, which I think is not seriously there, so we have already seen lines at LaGuardia airport as TSA employees call in “sick.” Everyday this condition of slavery persists, the calling in sick of the slaves will increase.
We adopted an amendment 154 years ago that abolished slavery in the United States of America. It is about time this amendment was enforced.
Barkley Rosser
Barkley:
Working without pay in the short term results in another penalty of how will their back pay be given to them. A “lump sum” may result in higher federal and state taxes. Hopefully, they just issue each check as being late.
Apparently the people who are really going to get shafted are contractors, most of whom will not get compensated later. I must admit that using the term “slavery” is a hyperbolic exaggeration. The government does not own these people and cannot do all the horrible things that slaveowners could and did do to their slaves. However, it is forced labor, which gets uglier and uglier the longer it goes on, and I am frankly shocked at how little discussion there is of this, although maybe it is because these shutdowns in the past have ended pretty quickly. But a lot of these people are incurring expenses just to work, transportation costs, child care, and other things. It may not be full-blown slavery, but it is shameful.
Barkley:
It is like being laid off and they said they will call you back. How do you leave? Hopefully you can find a temp job to fill the gap.
In the Coast Guard if you do not show up you can be court martialed or AWOL.
There may be state laws to consider. I don’t know if they could be applied to federal employees, but some states require payment within a certain time period after the work was performed.
I don’t know if the federal payroll system can accommodate it, but let us hope they can do a special payroll to get the late checks issued as soon as possible. Multiple special payrolls if it goes that far.
If every government employee–including the ones working for agencies that have budgets–walked off the job, the shutdown would end immediately. But that’s called “worker solidarity,” a union/socialist concept nobody in this idiot country understands anymore. Most Americans were just fine with the unions being destroyed, and this is the result, I have zero sympathy for them.
Karl…I sympathize. There re at least two court cases charging ‘involuntary servitude’
Yup Karl,
Every time they went on strike in NY City the rich and everyone understood who was the most valuable. The garbage men!
The trash would pile up real high.