Mike Causey

Shutdown Fallout: Stress Up, Productivity Down?

What is the threat of a government shutdown doing to your romance, marriage and number of times you yell at the kids? Senior Correspondent Mike Causey says a lo...

Federal News Network Staff

March 31, 2011 4:00 am

4 min read

The amount of stress you are feeling based on a possible government shutdown probably depends on your job, your romantic or marital status, family situation, age, salary and maybe even geographic location. And your meds.

The 300,000 inside-the-Beltway feds can, maybe, take comfort in the fact that many of their friends and neighbors are in the same boat or have been though this before. Or they may be more stressed out because this is a company town. Here we don’t mine coal, produce steel or plant taters or cotton. Those of us who don’t work for the government depend on those who do.

In smaller communities where the major federal presence is an IRS or Social Security office, or maybe an outpost of the Forest Service or Agriculture Department, there may be more shutdown-related uncertainty because the community is less focused on the government. Or not.

A young single federal worker may be feeling less stress than his or her colleague at the office who is older, has kids and may be raising a family on one income. If your kids have special needs, or they are in college, double or triple the anxiety level. And depending on how you live, within or outside your means, it doesn’t matter whether you are a GS 7 or an SESer.

Mortgages of $5,000 a month are not unusual in the Washington area (or in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles) and a fair number of feds, here and elsewhere, are probably treading water financially. Missing a paycheck (even if the money is later recouped) could mean the loss of internet/cable/cell phone or a bounced check to your kid’s soccer camp.

The number of people who know they should have 6 months cash stashed away for a rainy day (or a shutdown) is far larger than the number of people who actually have half a year’s pay in the credit union or under the mattress.

Judging from the e-mails we and other fed-related media outlets are getting, I would say feds are more angry than scared. Or maybe they are angry because they are scared.

Postal workers, facing a major downsizing, have their own problems, but the shutdown isn’t one of them. By the same token VA medical personnel, CIA officers, DHS personnel tracking terrorists and law enforcement officers have little to fear from a short-shutdown. But people who work in operations deemed non-emergency are definitely sweating the situation. So are tens of thousands of contractors who won’t be able to work – and won’t get paid now or later – if their government customers are furloughed.

Politicians who genuinely want government to work should think about the impact that on-again-off-again threats have on productivity as spelled out in this e-mail from a survivor of the last big shutdown:

“I remember the 21 day shutdown. For weeks before we did little work but sat around just nattering concerning the impending lay off. Then when we came back again we just nattered for weeks. All in all the work fell off something awful. Imagine what has been happening this year. Any work that is getting done is IN SPITE of congress.” Jonathan

Shutdown/SES Pay

Will you get paid if you are on leave during a shutdown? Should you delay retiring until after a shutdown? Does your health insurance continue if you are furloughed? The answers are no, no and yes. But there’s lots more. And we got the answers yesterday on our Your Turn with Mike Causey radio show with Steve Watkins and Steve Losey of the Federal Times.

Senior Excutive Association president Carol Bonosaro talked about the SES pay for performance system and about the 240 executives, in three agencies, whose 2010 pay raises have been recalled.

Financial planner Arthur Stein says workers under the FERS retirement system should cut back their contributions to their TSP accounts and channel that money into a rainy-day emergency fund.

To hear the entire show, click here.

To reach me: mcausey@federalnewsradio.com

Nearly Useless Factoid
by Suzanne Kubota

From AskMen.com’s 5 Things You Didn’t Know: Abraham Lincoln we learn that on the way to his first inauguration, the future president’s security codename was “nuts.”

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