Prison Guards Watching Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Are Unpaid Right Now Too
Thanks to this unbelievably asinine government shutdown, thousands and thousands of furloughed employees are getting royally screwed. But a gentle reminder that even excepted employees have been shafted too, employees like the corrections officers who're tasked with the Very Important Patriotic Work of guarding marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“We can’t leave them alone. We can’t put up a closed sign at 5:00 and say we’ll be back. So we’re there 24 hours a day,” Joe Gaucher, a corrections officer at Devens Federal Medical Center, the Massachusetts facility where Tsarnaev is imprisoned, tells WBZ Boston.
Excepted employees are continuing to work under the government shutdown, and while they're supposed to get paid eventually for their time, they won't see their regular paychecks until government operation resumes. So for now, they're just guarding an accused enemy of the state who's charged with using weapons of mass destruction on good-faith credit.
“We still have to pay for daycare, gas to get to work," Heather Wilson, a part-time nurse whose husband also works at Devens, also told WBZ. "Politicians don’t care and are not putting themselves in our shoes.”
[image via AP]
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