This comes as federal contractors have gone unpaid since December, affecting millions of contract workers, and as some 800,000 federal employees on furlough or forced to work without pay are poised to miss their second paycheck on Friday. On Wednesday, hundreds of unpaid federal workers flooded the Hart Senate Office Building demanding an end to the shutdown and back pay. The workers weren’t allowed to bring signs into the building so they wrote messages on paper plates, which they held aloft for 33 minutes of silent protest—one minute for each day of the government shutdown. They broke their silence chanting, “No more food banks, we need paychecks!” Meanwhile, aviation workers are warning the prolonged shutdown is leaving the airline industry prone to a major disaster. In a joint statement, unions representing air traffic controllers, pilots and flight attendants said, “In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break.”