Air traffic controllers are going without pay – but the bills don’t stoppublished at 11:29 GMT<\/p>\n
11:29 GMT<\/p>\n
“Like many families, we didn’t plan for a shutdown. Yet the bills don’t stop.”<\/p>\n
These are the words of one air traffic controller who has had to take up a second job working for a food delivery service to supplement his income – or lack of – during the government shutdown. <\/p>\n
Writing recently for MSNBC, the single father says he’s working this job after his daily air traffic shift ends and is “sleeping only two hours most nights”.<\/p>\n
He’s one of thousands of air traffic controllers who have now been working without pay for two weeks. Yesterday, many received paychecks in the amount of $0.<\/p>\n
The shutdown has exacerbated an already-strained body of federal workers. While some air traffic controllers are working without pay, others are furloughed altogether.<\/p>\n
Some are looking for second jobs, like the man above, while others are increasingly calling in sick.<\/p>\n
“The controllers are wearing thin,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Nick Daniels, the president of the labour union representing more than 20,000 aviation workers, put the situation into stark terms on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“Air traffic controllers are texting: ‘I don’t even have enough money to put gas in my car to come to work,'” he told CNN. <\/p>\n
“We base what we do day in and day out on predictability,” he said. “Right now there is no predictability.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Air traffic controllers are going without pay – but the bills don’t stoppublished at 11:29 GMT 11:29 GMT…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-122919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}