It seems federal government workers who were furloughed for the past couple of weeks don’t have to worry anymore about not paying their bills on time. According to a poll by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) poll, 57 percent of its government workers reached out to their creditors to warn them about not potentially paying their bills on time.
On Thursday, government officials and union leaders announced that 800,000 federal workers who were furloughed for two weeks would see their retroactive pay beginning Oct. 25. On top of that, federal government workers will also see a one percent pay hike in January.
However, the NTEU is complaining, even though a significant portion of its members received essentially a paid vacation.
“A lot of federal employees just received their paycheck on Tuesday,” said Colleen M. Kelley, NTEU president. “That means they’ll have to wait two weeks to receive their back pay. We don’t think they should have to do that.”
Despite the media and civil servants warning that the sky was falling and that they would be in financial disarray, they came up with a pretty good deal in the end. In fact, the only one that got the short end of the stick was their boss, the taxpayer.
According to the NTEU leader, furloughed workers will still suffer the “lasting effects” of the shutdown. “This unnecessary shutdown is causing enormous and real problems for our members, not to mention an unbearable level of anxiety and tension.”
Indeed, CNN published numerous reports over the past three weeks highlighting the financial pressures of government workers who have been earning $70,000 per year but still live paycheck-to-paycheck, a salary paid for by the United States taxpayers.
An important question to ask after all of this: will unions and federal workers ever be content with their generous salaries, benefits and other goodies? Most likely not because they get to feed from an unlimited trough and money pit that the president and Congress fund by stealing from the citizenry.
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