Government Shutdown Shakes Stability of Jobs That Are Often the Best Around
“Verla Bloomfield has the kind of workplace that seems plucked from a different era. She has a pension, a union, several weeks of vacation and a paycheck that has nearly doubled in 14 years. Her employer? The United States government. ‘People used to work for companies their whole life and retire and take their pension and move on,’ said Ms. Bloomfield, who handles claims for the Social Security Administration in Tulsa, Okla. ‘That’s not the reality of our work force anymore, but it still is for the federal government.’ By many measures, the last couple of decades scorched American workers. Wages crawled up, factory jobs fled to China and benefits collapsed. But those years look less painful if you worked for Uncle Sam.”