An estimated 800,000 federal workers will miss their second paycheck this week due to the government shutdown. 420,000 are working without pay, and 300,000 of them are furloughed (i.e., not working or being paid). Strapped for money, many are turning to the gig economy — driving for Uber or listing their homes on Airbnb — to make ends meet.
One of those employees is Cheryl Blum, a contract defense lawyer for Spanish-speaking clients in federal court in Tucson, Arizona. She has listed her room on Airbnb on and off for years, but now it is her sole source of income, she told me. And in an interview with the Associated Press last week, Blum said she was thinking about driving for Uber or Lyft for supplemental income, as well.
Airbnb is also offering help to federal workers with its “A Night on Us” program, where any federal worker who leases their home for three nights between December 18 and March 18 will be paid for an extra night, up to $110, by Airbnb.
Blum still has to work through the shutdown but has no idea when her next paycheck will arrive. Luckily, she says, Tucson is very popular at the time of year, so she’s been getting lots of inquiries about her listing.
“It can’t make up for the income I’m losing, but it provides money for necessities like paying bills and buying groceries,” she says. “Without my regular income, paying the mortgage will be difficult.” Before the shutdown, Blum ordered some renovations to her home, but without steady income, she’s wary about how she’ll pay for that. She knows her family is feeling the pressure as well.
“My teenager went out and bought bread for his own sandwiches the other day,” she says.
As a defense lawyer, Blum says she is always on call and must be able to meet clients in prison at any time. A few days ago, she was supposed to meet with a client for a court-ordered interview in a prison, but because of the shutdown, there was no prison security to accompany her client to the interview room and the meeting couldn’t happen. This, she says, wastes time and isn’t fair to her clients. Blum represents a fair number of immigrants who have been arrested at the border.
“The work is being created because of our policies,” she says. “We are hired because people have constitutional rights. To cut off people’s pay, it’s an extremely unfair situation.”
Blum says most people working in the federal courts are “real purists,” passionate about what they do, but this shutdown has made her rethink where she puts her efforts. Instead of working mostly in the federal court system, she says going forward, she will diversify her workload and take fewer immigration cases.
“I want to make myself shutdown-proof as an attorney,” she told Vox.
Brian Hidden, who works as a biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Springfield, Illinois, is also rethinking his career. When he got out of the military, Hidden says his goal was to work at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. While he still loves his job and doesn’t want to give up on it, this government shutdown is making things harder. “If this continues to happen, I got to put my family above my dream job,” he told Vox.
If Hidden wasn’t furloughed, he would be planning for habitat restoration for federal trust species, like migratory birds and endangered animals, he says. Instead, he’s driving an Uber 40 to 50 hours per week.
According to the State Journal-Register, Hidden started looking into driving for Uber on his way to his family’s winter vacation ski trip, which they had to scale back due to the uncertainty of the shutdown. After a 10-day registration process, Hidden started driving for Uber in January.
Hidden’s Uber wages are about one-third what he was making as a federal employee. Combined with his wife’s job as a nurse practitioner, these wages are helping keep the couple and their two children afloat.
Hidden calls his wife, who is looking for secondary employment on top of her nurse practitioner job; his mom, who has offered to help his family financially; and the family and friends of all furloughed workers the “unsung heroes” of the government shutdown.
“If it weren’t for [my wife], we would definitely not be making all our payments,” he told Vox.
Hidden feels that public perception of federal workers hasn’t been very positive. After his story was published in the paper, he saw lots of comments about how federal government employees should have savings for times like this. But, he says, many federal jobs don’t pay enough to save money to cover two to three months without income.
Lots of the posts he’s seen on his own Facebook have also referred to this time as a “paid vacation.”
“It seems so un-American to not be supportive of other Americans,” he says. “It’s never a good thing when people lose their jobs and lose their paycheck.”
The New York Times reported that Angela Kelley of Milwaukee picked up Uber shifts as her job at the federal Bureau of Land Management is furloughed during the shutdown. Kelley, 51, told the Times she started driving for Uber to earn enough to purchase fruit and pullup diapers for her 3-year-old granddaughter, who is legally in her care.
As a federal employee, she earned $1,100 every two weeks, but on one of her best days driving Uber, she earned $50. While being interviewed by the Times, she waited two hours and then got pinged to complete one ride, from which she made $3.37.
The DC area specifically has seen an uptick in inquiries about temporary jobs. In Rockville, Maryland, hundreds of furloughed workers applied for temporary jobs at the Montgomery County Public Schools. According to WUSA9, there are a ton of positions open including substitute teacher, teacher, school bus driver, and maintenance worker. At the DC Superior Court, Morris Williams is on furlough from his IT contract, but as a contract worker, he is unlikely to get back pay or paid for his work when the shutdown is over.
Fiverr, a site where freelancers can list their services, has seen a 41 percent uptick in services offered in the DC area since the government shut down. According to Fiverr, this spike is especially significant because it took place over the holidays. During the same time last year, there was a 26 percent relative decrease of services listed in the DC area. In the California-Lexington Park area of Maryland, where federal workers make up 16 percent of the population, Fiverr saw a 350 percent increase in services listed.
Neither Hidden nor Blum expressed faith in the government’s ability to resolve the situation, both using the phrase “out of touch” to describe how the administration is currently operating. Blum says she feels as though leaders are “putting a foot on the neck” of the American the public and she doesn’t see an end in sight.
“All I can say is, I feel much worse than when I gave an interview last week,” she says.
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