When an air traffic controller gets his hours cut from 80 per two week pay period to 70 per 2 week period, his pay HAS been cut.
Most of the furloughs have been implemented by cutting a day every 2 weeks or so through the end of the fiscal year. Most agencies aren’t sending folks home for a week or a month.
You’ve got a tension between workers who want to try to get the work done, and senior managers who want a disaster to make the Obama regime look good. It’s the opposite from a normal situation where things are the other way around.
When I was in CA I called the Franchise Tax Board for a work related issue. A man answered the phone and let me tell him the whole story, then told me that it was furlough Friday and he didn’t know anything except to answer the phone, didn’t even take messages. I wondered why they were paying someone for that when they could have made a recording, then figured it was a union job to stick it to us greedy taxpayers.