Two memos from OPM, the central personnel agency, address issues arising with the partial government shutdown now more than a month old, with 800,000 employees facing their second payless biweekly payday late this week or early next week.

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One memo explains the implications of a bill President Trump signed last week to provide back pay to employees who have been sent home on unpaid furlough as if they had worked. That had been done in previous shutdowns but legislation was needed to guarantee it.

When funding for their agency is restored, those employees will be entitled to the pay they “would have received for the furlough hours had the lapse in appropriations not occurred and the employee had performed work,” the memo says. “It includes the following types of payments: the employee’s rate of basic pay; overtime and other premium pay for regularly scheduled work; regular premium payments (such as law enforcement availability pay), and allowances and differentials payable on a regular basis.”

The only exception, it says, is time the employee previously had been scheduled to be on leave without pay, for example for unpaid family leave. Furlough time also will count as time worked for purposes of accruing paid sick leave and vacation time.

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Those same policies applied following the last lengthy partial government shutdown, covering more than two weeks in 2013.

Those who remain at work without pay during a shutdown are assured under long-standing policies that they will receive back pay. However, as with furloughed employees, they won’t be paid until their agency reopens.

As the shutdown has dragged on, more and more of those employees have said that they cannot afford to go to work.

The second OPM memo recognizes that issue, saying that in contrast to furloughed employees, those employees “have the additional expense of coming to work, but are having their compensation delayed. These employees may have also lost their subsidies for childcare and transit benefits, and are generally ineligible for unemployment benefits if they are working full-time,” it says.

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“OPM strongly encourages agencies to be as accommodating as possible during the current lapse in appropriations to allow telework-eligible employees performing excepted duties to telework more frequently, permit flexible start and stop times under a flexible work schedule, and provide employees with the ability to request time off based on their personal circumstances,” it says.

However, “employees who were directed to perform excepted work during a lapse in appropriations but failed to report to duty may be placed in absent without leave (AWOL) status for missed work hours” and would not receive back pay in that case, the memo says.

The recently signed law “establishes a new requirement” that such employees may request time off from work, it adds. Agencies are to apply their regular policies when deciding whether to approve such requests “while keeping in mind any special work requirements for excepted employees during the lapse in appropriations.”