WASHINGTON—With the nation’s 14,000 air traffic controllers still on their stressful jobs but missing their first paycheck due to the government shutdown, the controllers and their union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, jumped into the shutdown showdown, big time, demanding lawmakers reopen the government. Their message to President Donald Trump and to the Congress—whose ruling Republicans engineered the shutdown that began Oct. 1—is simple: End it, now.
NATCA took that message to a press conference at Washington National Airport and TV interviews and an op-ed by union President Nick Daniels. Off-duty controllers leafletted passengers at 20 key airports nationwide, including National, Chicago’s O’Hare, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, New York LaGuardia, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Los Angeles.
And they launched a national e-mail “contact Congress” drive which has already drawn 41,000 responses. The Congress, of course, has been actually suspended for a month now by a president acting, in the meantime, as a virtual dictator.
The controllers are among the estimated 700,000 federal workers whom Trump declared “essential.” He ordered them to work unpaid during the shutdown.
Trump needs seven or eight Senate Democrats to join 52-53 ruling Republicans to approve a temporary money bill to reopen the whole government. The Democratic price is to go qalong with that is for Republicans to reverse the massive health care cost changes that will hit the country due to prior GOP-passed laws: Cuts for 14 million Medicaid recipients, doubled premiums for 22 million people who use Obamacare and big insurance hikes for everyone else.
Meanwhile, the other 1.3 million federal workers have been sent home unpaid. Like the controllers, they don’t know when, or whether, they’ll get a paycheck again. If Trump, the nation’s biggest union-buster, and his Office of Management and Budget chief, Russell Vought, have their way, the answer for many if not most of both groups will be “never.”
And the controllers are saying they can’t live like that.
“How am I going to feed my family? How am I going to pay my mortgage to keep a roof over my family’s head? How am I going to pay for child care?” asked Columbus, Ohio, controller Matthew Adair on the union’s YouTube video. “As a single dad with two kids, I live paycheck to paycheck,” added Portland, Ore., tower controller Steven Brown.
“I started doing DoorDash to make sure I had some money coming in to buy groceries, diapers and wraps,” said Miami, Fla., en route center controller Christian Peguero.
The answer from Trump regime Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, at a press conference at National Airport, was to sympathize with their plight, then state, “They need to show up for work.”
The combination of all work, even more stress than before and no pay at all upsets NATCA President Daniels. Air traffic control is one of the most-stressful jobs in the U.S., so much so that the mandatory retirement age for a controller is 55. And many if not most work six-day weeks, 10 hours a day.
“Some of the lowest-paid controllers work in the highest-cost-of-living areas, while others live paycheck-to-paycheck trying to make ends meet,” Daniels wrote in the op-ed for The Hill. “Instead of being completely focused on their jobs, these hard-working Americans now must deal with the stress of their jobs while also worrying about how to pay their bills.
“Today, controllers will receive their first zero-dollar paycheck…No income. Nothing, all while they are working full-time and, more often than not, mandatory overtime.
“These additional distractions will compound the existing risks in an already strained system. Every day the shutdown continues, the National Airspace System becomes less safe than it was the day before, as the controllers’ focus shifts from their critical safety tasks to their financial uncertainty.”
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