All of The Places Offering Help to Government Employees

If you are one of the many government employees working without pay or furloughed workers, there are a handful of restaurants and services offering to help you.

First, Consumers Energy is helping government workers by encouraging them to contact Consumers and they will help with their bill. Consumers will help by allowing government workers to make flexible payment arrangements or extensions to provide more time to pay a bill. If you are a government worker looking assistant you can call 211 and also learn more here. 

In addition, there are at least 25 Michigan credit unions that are offering assistance. You can see the list of credit unions here. Most of these places are offering loans with 0% interest, payment delays such as no-cost "skip a pay" on loans, as well as fee waivers on checking account overdraft fees.

Along with the 25 Michigan credit unions that are helping workers, there are also national banks like Citi, Bank of America, Chase, and more willing to help. You can see what they are doing to help here. In addition, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon are all offering assistance whether that means "flexable payments" or Promise to Pay" program which Verizon is doing. To get details and to find out how to be in these programs you can see it here.  

Next some restaurants are helping as Great Harvest Bread Co. in Okemos has their "shut down shelf." so that means any federal worker not receiving a paycheck can pick up a free loaf of bread. Also Tourmina's Pizza in Lansing is offering free lunch to all federal employees who have an official ID Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 p.m.  Tanger Outlets is offering perks to impacted government employees, including a free $20 gift card through January 28th. Pot belly the sandwich chain, is offering buy-one-get-one-free sandwiches to unpaid workers through the weekend.