Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Holding the employees hostage’
Concerns on rise for Kennedy Space Center workers during government shutdown
CAPE CANAVERAL — They filled nearly every seat in the room, a sea of union T-shirts, baseball caps and calloused hands.
Where else were unionized Kennedy Space Center workers — the people who fixed the power grid or ran safety checks for launches — supposed to go on a Tuesday afternoon while a government shutdown persisted into its 18th day, keeping them from a paycheck and fraying their resistance?
“I didn’t expect to see this big a group here today, but what else you got going on?” one woman said, then added, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make fun of it.”
Nearly 60 people had turned out for the meeting of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local 2061 in Cape Canaveral seeking answers about how to endure the stalemate between President Donald Trump and Congress over a border wall with Mexico.
About 1,200 employees at Kennedy Space Center whose jobs have been deemed “non-essential” — 600 of them represented by this union — have been at home since Dec. 22. To bridge the gap, many of them are using paid vacation days, burning through their savings accounts, cutting back on expenses and trying to get extensions on their home and auto payments.
“Our rent and our mortgages don’t stop, the electric doesn’t stop, our phones don’t stop. These are all putting people in a predicament that if they live week to week, it’s going to be catastrophic,” said Steve Ching, a high voltage electrician with engineering firm AECOM. “They are holding the employees hostage over this political debate.”
And for contractors, like the members of the union, nothing is guaranteed. They’re not government employees, so they are not assured back pay once everything is resolved.
Until then, the repercussions are already widespread — and they’re mounting.
“We are not going to get a paycheck,” said Michele Seeley, whose husband, Wil Villegas, also works at KSC. Both are environmental health specialists with Integrated Mission Support Services.
They’ve used all their vacation time, and are now dipping into Villegas’ retirement fund from the military. Their two kids, ages 2 and 4, have also been at home since the KSC day care closed. And they’ve only been called into work a few hours at a time on an as-needed basis.
“So instead of a 40-hour week, you’re having a fourhour week and that’s it,” Seeley said. “Having no income and being at home, everyone is starting to get stir crazy.”
Some workers are being told to use their allotted sick time for 2019 to make ends meet during the shutdown, said John Jones, a senior machinist with Engineering Research and Consulting, a subcontractor for Jacobs, NASA’s largest aerospace services provider.
“If you’re negative 80 hours, what happens if something major happens? Someone gets sick or something?” Jones said. “But [they] tell you to use it — it just seems wrong.”
Health insurance is one of the major concerns plaguing furloughed government contractors, who in some cases have to send their employers checks or ask to use their personal leave time to pay their health insurance co-pays and continue their coverage.
For other workers, like Tim McGinnis, the worry is paying the bills. McGinnis, a precision cleaning mechanic at AECOM, said he’s trying to convince his bank to postpone his mortgage and car payments for a month. His wife, Kiesha McGinnis, also works at KSC as a logistics specialist for Apache-Logical. They have a 5 year-old, Dacie.
To cut back, they’ve started picking up Dacie from pre-kindergarten at noon to save the $125 a week on after-school care. And they’re trying to make the food in the fridge last.
“We got into an argument last night … she’s like, ‘that’s been there for a while,’ and I said, ‘It’s not freezer burnt, we can still eat it, you know — we’ve got to conserve,’ ” McGinnis said.
He knows all too well the lasting impact of a shutdown. McGinnis and some of his coworkers still haven’t been paid for four hours they worked during the last government shutdown in January 2018.
He’s filed grievances with the company and he’s worried that if he doesn’t keep fighting it, it’ll set a precedent.
“It’s not about the four hours, that’s not the point,” McGinnis said. “It’s about right now.”