YMCAs offering free use to furloughed workers
Six area YMCAs are among those that will defer February membership dues for those affected by the partial federal shutdown, it was announced Thursday.
Further, Greater Philadelphia YMCA, which operates those YMCAs, will invite non-member government employees and their families affected by the shutdown to use Y facilities for the month of February free of charge.
“We are committed to connecting people to healthier lives. We know the combination of exercise and the sense of community they will find at the Y, can alleviate some of the stress these federal employees are feeling,” Shaun Elliott, President and CEO of the Greater Philadelphia YMCA, said in his announcement.
“We hope that this will undo some of the financial pressure on our current members. But we also invite any federal workers, affected by this shutdown, to take this opportunity to experience the support we offer our communities every day,” said Elliott.
Local YMCA branches included in this offer are Audubon, Boyertown, Phoenixville, Pottstown, Spring Valley and Upper Perkiomen Valley.
Now the longest federal government shut down in U.S. history, “Trump administration officials now say that the government shutdown is having more than twice the negative impact on the economy than they first estimated,” according to a report
in Forbes.
Evidently, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors did not include contractors not being paid or the ripple effect on the economy such as restaurant meals not being taken or movies seen or the greater personal impacts of not having money to buy food, pay rent or have to sell a car when it made its original estimates, according to Forbes.
Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Tuesday that “the shutdown should reduce economic growth by 0.13 percentage points for every week that it lasts vs. the 0.1 percentage points every two weeks it originally projected,” Forbes reported.
The New York Times reported Thursday that “tens of thousands of federal employees” are filing for unemployment benefits this week.
“The Labor Department reported 10,454 initial claims by federal workers for the week that ended Jan. 5, doubling the previous week’s figure. Thousands more have applied since, state officials said,” the Times reported Thursday.
Home to more than 45,000 federal employees, the Philadelphia metropolitan region has one of the highest concentrations of government employees outside of the Washington, DC region. Those employees missed their first paycheck this past Friday as the shutdown drags well into its third week.
To qualify for the YMCA offer, federal employees need only present a federal employee ID. The deferral will cover the entire month of February, regardless of when the shutdown may be resolved.