MOUNTAIN VIEW (KRON) -- Locked out of their jobs at the NASA Ames research park in Mountain View, furloughed NASA Ames employees staged a protest rally outside the main gate on Friday. They just want to go back to work union representative Jonas Dino said.
“We want to work,” said Dino. “End the shutdown now.”
In danger of losing their second paycheck next week, the furloughed scientists and other employees spent the morning at a nearby motel where their union wrote hundred dollar checks for grocery money.
But that won’t help with the mortgage says Suzanne Meyer.
“Employees who work for the government, when this first started out, usually come in at a lower grade and they don’t make very much money.”
“I feel kind of lost, just sitting around at home waiting for this to end,” said another furloughed worker Richard Jaffe.
Some workers are said to be looking for work elsewhere while others have already moved on. Instead of making picket signs, we should be doing research says electrical engineer Jon Jenkins.
“My team built the science pipeline that processed all the data that found the planets,” said Jenkins. “We’ve found over 2,600 planets.”
Motorists honked their support as about a hundred furloughed workers marched across Highway 101, many of those signs blaming President Trump for the shutdown.
“People are living paycheck to paycheck. Uncertainty in where our next paycheck will come from is not a good situation,” said Dino.
