The 800K is a round number of federal employees. There were 400K furloughed and 380K forced to work without pay (or the other way around, I don't recall offhand which was which). They will all get back pay, eventually.
In addition to that roughly 800K, there are as many as 1 million federal contractors (the exact number is kind of fuzzy) who were forced out of work. It's unclear whether or not they will recover the pay they lost. Unlike federal employees, their pay is not federally guaranteed. A lot of those contractors work at the lowest-paying jobs - office cleaners, cafeteria workers, maintenance workers, etc. Of all the people impacted by this, they were probably the least able to weather the storm |
