House votes to approve back pay for furloughed workers

The Washington Post ^ | 10/5/13 | Jeff Simon

[shego]

As the fifth day of the federal government shutdown began, members of the House came together in a moment of rare bipartisanship to pass a bill, by a vote of 407 to 0, approving back pay for furloughed government workers....

[arthurus]

That should be the ultimate goal. Anything less is compromise with Statism and merely sets back the progress of the statist grind a little bit. Compromise should be used as a tactic but reinstituting the Constitution should be the goal.

Unfortunately with politicians compromise only works to increase government power. The left demands 150% of what they think they can get and raises the demands when the others offer to compromise. The end agreement and legislation enact 200% of the original leftist demand.

[COBOL2Java]

Exactly so. Only the blue-badgers get a paid vacay. I applied for unemployment Friday.

[trebb]

90 % of the nonmilitary federal employees are utterly nonessential to maintain a Constitutional system. We do not need park rangers because it is not essential that the government own and land outside of DC. Military bases can and should be leased from the States or from private property owners. Federal welfare has no Constitutional basis and neither does federal regulation of medicine or insurance or 99% of what the federal government stifles/regulates. And the ETC. is huge. If you are a Tory rather than an American style conservative then you are concerned to “conserve” the status quo for which all those government workers are essential except the ones who could be eliminated if WF&A were “cleaned up.” which could only be done by appointing a Commission to clean it up with many thousands of new federal workers to do the studies which would recommend that many more thousands be hired to do the actual cleaning up &c et al v/v.

I agree with most of what you say - my point was the meaning of "non-essential" is a technical term and not based on opinion. It can also be used for active duty in certain situations. Until/if the Feds pare down the civilian workforce for pure Constitutional economy, there are many civilians that are essential in direct military support roles. Even paring down the actual civilian workforce will not please many once they discover the costs of contractors who will be used to fill the voids where actual mission impacts would occur. I can see a long-term, target-by-target, plan being effective if properly planned and executed, but there is no quick fix.

[COBOL2Java]

That is correct, and if this goes on for a month or more, the small private company I work for will go out of business.

[arthurus]

Military is essential. Military support is essential.

[1010RD]

Read here:http://washingtonexaminer.com/tea-party-loosens-k-streets-stranglehold-on-the-gop/article/2536847?

To keep winning we need to elect more Rands and Cruzes to the Senate and strengthen the conservative hold on the House.

We have to hobble the power of the K Street crowd and force the NRSC to fund our guys. You do that by shaming them to death. The country doesn’t need to Democratic parties.

[COBOL2Java]

My understanding is that the contractors are not being paid.

FYI, I just heard from my (small) company. They're going to allow us to go negative on our PTO up to 40 hours. So we can use up our earned PTO (vacation time), then after that's all gone, go negative (i.e., earn it back over the upcoming months). After that, it's LWOP and applying for unemployment.

I'm not complaining, just informing.

[EternalVigilance]

Thanks for the information!

[USAFJeeper]

I just got recalled, haha. Now my question is this, if I can be recalled to work without pay until this crap is over with, then why did we get furloughed in the first place? I will not get a paycheck this week, or probably for the next 2. but I will be supporting the war-fighter again, so that’s good.

[shego]

There seems to be some misunderstanding about what "non-essential" employees are. It does not mean they are unproductive or superfluous. It means their office will continue functioning on any given day if they are not there.

As an example of this, I used to work in the records section of the National Weather Service. I maintained the records of the thousands of weather reporting devices spread across the nation. Keeping those records was necessary to determine which devices worked well, which did not, and which kept getting vandalized. NWS needed this information to maintain all the devices efficiently. But on any given day, if I wasn't there, the weather reporting went on.

True; the terms "essential" and "non-essential" should be replaced by something more correctly descriptive like "time-critical" and "non-time-critical".

[shego]

The government only hires the unemployable and the most worthless

Jeez, I haven't heard such hatred of our soldiers and veterans since dirty hippies spit on them as they returned from Vietnam.

[Slambat]

“Jeez, I haven’t heard such hatred of our soldiers and veterans since dirty hippies spit on them as they returned from Vietnam.”

A good example of a bad attempt to intentionally take
something out of context. You know what I mean you just
want to be silly.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Govt contractors who carry a significant part of the federal workload don’t get diddly.

They can use of Vacation time, Paid Time Off, or Unpaid Leave.

My next paycheck is going to look like a Depression paycheck or worse.