General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you are forced to work without pay, you are a slave. [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,062 posts)BUT that is not what is happening here.
No federal employee is being forced to work without pay. Period.
Every single federal employee could walk off the job today, without direct consquence to life and limb. There may be contractual (and financial) consequences for walking off without proper notice (unless you are not an at-will employee). BUT the federal government is not going to chase you with hounds and guns, throw chains around you and drag you behind a car, a noose around your neck and string you up in a tree, or worse, for walking off off the job. Those (or era-specific equivalents thereof) are not only things that all happened to slaves who walked off the "job" - but the perpetrators of such violence were legally entitled to inflict such atrocities because slaves were (legally) nothing more than property.