posted on August 5, 2004 10:45:45 AM new
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A slap in the face to our troops: Veterans face unemployment problems in Bush economy.
August 04, 2004, 09:27 AM
Last week, the Labor Department quietly reported new data on the employment status of veterans – including those who have been discharged and returned to the workforce since Bush took office in January 2001.
The report shows that the employment situation for recent veterans is disgraceful. While veterans overall are more likely to be employed than their non-veteran peers, those veterans discharged from the service since Jan. 2001 are much more likely to be unemployed than the population at large. These recently-discharged troops face an unemployment rate of 6.9%.
The 6.9% unemployment rate for newly-discharged veterans is 23% higher than the national rate. Veterans who were discharged from the Armed Forces since Jan. 2001 have a jobless rate of 6.9%, which is 23% higher than the national unemployment rate of 5.6%.
[Source: “Employment Situation of Veterans Summary,” U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 7/27/04, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/vet.nr0.htm]
Perhaps it should come as no surprise – after all, anyone who has had to look for new job in the Bush economy knows that there just aren’t new jobs available. With the number of jobs shrinking by more than 1 million under Bush, there’s little room for new job-seekers.
These new numbers simply confirm what veterans themselves have been saying: that finding a good-paying job when they come home is a challenge they didn’t expect.
Associated Press, 6/10/04
Staff Sgt. Richard Lynch and Spc. Howell Horan found themselves unemployed when they returned from combat duty in Iraq with the Florida National Guard, and both say their job prospects look dim…. [for Lynch,] the siding warehouse where he worked went out of business while he was deployed… [while Horan] had been laid off as a telephone and computer cable installer just before being called up.
“I don’t know if people aren’t hiring me because I’m in the National Guard and there’s the threat that we may be called back up,” said Horan, 31, who had moved from Panama City to Columbia, Tenn., three months before he was deployed.
The husband and father of three said he suspects that may be happening because his brother, also a guardsman, had similar difficulty finding a new job.
“A lot of people didn’t want him because he was National Guard,” Horan said. He said employers have told him, instead, that they just aren’t hiring.
Lynch, 35, of Pensacola, said he has been told he lacks the education and experience needed for management or warehouse jobs and that his military service doesn’t matter.
“It would be nice if it would,” said Lynch, who is married with two children. ...
In one case, an employer refused to give a soldier a raise, claiming other workers had received only merit increases while he was away. All the other employees, however, had gotten such raises, although at differing rates, Garrett said. The issue was settled with the soldier getting a raise at the average percentage of other workers’ increases.
Another soldier complained that an employer failed to contribute to his individual retirement account while he was gone. It was settled with the employer agreeing to make up the difference, said former State Attorney David Bludworth of West Palm Beach, ESGR’s Florida chairman.
During the 13 months that National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Michael Boddy, 40, of Pensacola, was on active duty, his employer, the Santa Rosa County Tax Collector’s Office, paid nothing into the state retirement system.
Albany (NY) Times-Union, 3/14/04:
From last March until August, Sgt. Kieran Mutchler led a platoon of 48 Marines in Iraq. He returned home to a big welcome and a parade.
“It was almost like being a movie star,” Mutchler said, now out of the Marine Corps Reserve and living in Albany.
It took about a week for the high to wear off. The pride he felt in Iraq, being lionized by children as he served with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, isn’t translating into his daily routine here. Now, he’s just angling for work, competing for $7-an-hour jobs at places that don’t necessarily value his skills with grenades and mortar rounds.
“Hotel, restaurant, security—any job that can offer a decent wage and some kind of benefits,” the University at Albany alumnus said last week at the Marine Corps Reserve offices on Washington Avenue. He was wearing civvies, but his hair is still Marine Corps short, his black shoes still respectably shined.
“It’s tough,” he said. “I try not to be a pessimist, but it’s tough”
Corpus Christi (TX) Caller, 2/23/04:
Judy Dominguez said that when her husband, Staff Sgt. Robert Dominguez, came home, he almost went right back to the Middle East to work there as a civilian because he could not find work here.
Legally, companies are required to hire reserve troops back into the same jobs and salaries they left behind, but if a company goes out of business, so does the reservist’s job protection. In Dominguez’s case, the trucking company he worked for as both a part-time driver and dispatcher folded, leaving him with the possibility of a severance package with the company. He also owned his own trucking business.
In Dominguez’s case, his reputation as a hard worker allowed him to secure a job with another trucking company just before he began to pursue the idea of returning to the Middle East, Judy Dominguez said.
Other members of the unit have not been as fortunate. Some say it has been common practice to hire reservists back for one day, meeting the legal requirement, and then let them go because their position had been filled long ago.
posted on August 5, 2004 11:49:19 PM new
I'm so ashamed for everyone here that this post got no response at all.
We have soldiers dying for us as we play on the computer with our oh-so-important squabbles.
And this is how we show support for our troops.
It's a national disgrace how our service men and women are treated upon there return from fighting....can't get their jobs back or get good, expedient health care.
Sorry if this is a dry subject but I would've thought their problems would be of greater concern especially for all the "war happy" here.
