World News Korner

Essential but unpaid Weather Service employees in the Alaska bureau insert secret call for help in their nightly bulletin.

Courtesy of Raw Story:

Someone at the National Weather Service’s Alaska bureau has a message for those who have shut down the government: “PLEASE PAY US.”

Check the left hand side and read down.

Raw Story contacted the Anchorage office, but was told that “no one wanted to comment right now.”

Although many National Weather Service employees are considered “essential” and are therefore exempted from the furloughs caused by the government shutdown.

However, as Dan Sobien, present of the NWS Employee Organization told Popular Science, these “essential” employes aren’t being paid.

“There’s no money to pay them,” he said. “Nobody knows when anyone’s going to get paid.”

In the meantime, these employees are being issued IOUs if they work despite the lack of compensation for their labor.

People need to be paid for their work, and asking them to work without compensation while the people who caused this train wreck are still able to draw their pay is unconscionable. (And yes I know a number of millionaire lawmakers have said they will refuse their pay during the shutdown as well, in a purely symbolic gesture. But let's face it, MOST of these guys simply use their Congressional pay for cab fair, tipping doormen, and renting hookers anyhow. Nobody in THEIR families are going to go to bed hungry due to this shutdown.)

I have to imagine that if this thing goes on muhc longer there will be crowds of furloughed federal workers with torches and pitchforks at the ready.

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