‘Mr. President, Do Your Job So We Can Do Ours’: AFL-CIO Marks One Month of Shutdown Pain for Working People
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued the following statement marking one month since the federal government’s funding expired and a shutdown began:
“For one month, President Trump and his allies have shut down the government and forced more than 2 million federal workers and contractors to miss paychecks. Working people are lining up at food banks; taking out loans; racking up credit card debt; and scrambling to cover monthly bills like rent, car payments and utilities. Millions of jobs are being threatened in government, health care, food service and other industries. Twenty-two million Americans are trying to sign up for health insurance on Open Enrollment Day, only to learn the Trump administration has priced them out of care. Nearly 180 million people with job-based insurance will soon discover the same.
“President Trump and his allies in Congress could end this chaos today. Instead, they are killing jobs at home, building gold-plated ballrooms, sending billions of dollars overseas and taking a month-long paid vacation.
“Mr. President, do your job so we can do ours. It’s time to fund the government, fix the health care crisis and put working people first.”
One month into the shutdown, the Trump administration is inflicting even more pain on working people by:
- Pricing workers out of health care by more than doubling ACA health insurance premiums and spiking health care costs by nearly $500 a year for people with employer-based insurance.
- Withholding more than $5 billion in SNAP benefits, jeopardizing 90,000 jobs and forcing 42 million Americans to go hungry.
- Ripping child care away from the working parents of 65,000 children in more than 40 states.
Working people are paying the price for President Trump and his allies’ political games:
- 1.4 million federal workers and at least 1 million federal contractors have missed paychecks, with 670,000 workers locked out of their jobs and 730,000 workers doing their jobs without pay.
- Hundreds of thousands of construction, transportation, energy, and state and local government jobs were destroyed when the Trump administration canceled more than 200 infrastructure projects.
- More than 4,000 federal workers received Reduction in Force (RIF) notices after the administration illegally fired them and threatened to fire 10,000 more.
- Furloughed federal workers are struggling to buy groceries, and the administration has threatened to unlawfully withhold their back pay.
Contact: Onotse Omoyeni, 202-637-5018