A sense of duty: Why work in the Lowcountry without being paid during the shutdown?
Four days a week, Roy Weaver gets to work at 6 a.m., opens his computer, and sees what needs fixing.
As an airway transportation safety specialist for the Federal Aviation Administration, Weaver works ten-hour days, four days a week, ensuring communication between air traffic control towers and the pilots in cockpits runs smoothly.
He fixes instrument landing systems to help planes land when visibility is low. He fixes radios, so pilots and controllers can communicate, and he fixes precision approach path indicators installed on runways to tell pilots where to land.
Some days, he’s on the road for hours, from home in Savannah to airports in Hilton Head, Statesboro, Jekyll Island and Brunswick. Weaver spent 22 years in the military and joined the FAA in 2017. It’s the best job he’s ever had, he said. He likes that it’s different every day and that he has the freedom to do what he needs to do.
“You don’t have somebody looking over your shoulder, because they rely on you to be the expert,” Weaver said.
But over the past month of change, things have been stressful. The government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history, sent thousands of “non-essential” federal employees home and required thousands more “essential” workers to perform their jobs without pay.
Shutdown impact
Travel disruptions at airports in Savannah and Hilton Head have been limited during the shutdown, officials say. But the situation puts a strain on U.S. airspace and the workforce that supports it. Widespread delays and cancellations have been reported at the nation’s major airports, and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said things will get worse if the shutdown continues into the holiday season.
Parts of the airspace may have to close if safety becomes a concern, Duffy said.
“The longer this goes on, every day these hardworking Americans have bills they have to pay and they’re being forced to make decisions and choices,” Duffy said Tuesday at a press conference in Philadelphia. “Do they go to work as an air traffic controller, or do they have to find a different job to get resources, money, to put food on the table or to get gas in the car.”
Weaver is the local representative for the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union representing about 11,000 FAA employees who install and maintain the equipment controllers and pilots need to communicate. About 5,000 technicians are working without pay, and 2,000 of about 3,300 aviation safety inspectors represented by PASS have been furloughed, said Liz Doherty, the union’s communications director.
On Monday, the U.S. Travel Association and dozens of partners, including the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, sent a letter to Congressional leadership, urging legislators to reopen the U.S. government ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.
The travel economy has already lost more than $4 billion because of the shutdown, the letter said, and things will get worse unless the government steps in to prevent a “Thanksgiving travel crisis.”
“With Thanksgiving, the busiest travel period of the year, imminently approaching, the consequences of a continued shutdown will be immediate, deeply felt by millions of American travelers and economically devastating to communities in every state,” the letter reads.
A strong sense of duty
Weaver said he feels lucky, because he has a safety net in place. He’s been through many shutdowns before and saved accordingly; the last one didn’t hurt him too badly because he was still doing weekend military work at the time. But he knows many of his colleagues aren’t as lucky.
“It depends on your life, and you know, if you’ve got five children, that’s expensive. There’s really no planning for that,” he said.
The shutdown exacerbates the problem of staffing in the FAA, Weaver said. He works with a lot of old but still functional 20th-century equipment, and the learning curve for new workers can be significant.
“You get a new hire, and it just takes three years for them to be comfortable doing the bare minimum volume,” he said. “It just takes a long time because a lot of the stuff’s old and nobody speaks that language anymore, technology-wise.”
Even though staff is feeling extra pressure right now, they’re still showing up to work, Weaver said. Many FAA employees are former military and feel a strong sense of duty.
“If you’ve been in the military, you just have that mindset — job needs to be done,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that rely on us. Hundreds of millions of people. They have to get somewhere. Without us, they’re not going anywhere.”