About a fourth of US government employees are military veterans. Fourteen percent of guardsmen and reserves have active duty jobs. Federal law makes it illegal for any employer to discriminate against these troops when their government recalls them to active duty.
Would it therefore surprise you to learn who the biggest offender against that law is?
In fiscal 2011, more than 18 percent of the 1,548 complaints of violations of that law involved federal agencies, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
“On the one hand, the government asked me to serve in Iraq,” said retired Army Brig. Gen. Michael Silva, a reservist who commanded a brigade in Iraq and was fired from his job as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol contractor on his return. “On the other hand, another branch of government was not willing to protect my rights after serving.”
The federal government is the largest employer of citizen-soldiers. About 123,000 of the 855,000 men and women currently serving as Guard members and reservists, or about 14 percent, have civilian jobs with the federal government. Over a fourth of federal employees are veterans.
The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), enacted in 1994 to ensure that members of the military do not face a disadvantage in their civilian careers because of their service, calls on the federal government be “a model employer” for service members.
But critics contend that the federal government has been far from perfect, and they fear that with troops back home from Iraq and more on the way from Afghanistan, violations of the law could increase.
Good enough to serve, fight and maybe die. Just not good enough to retain.
Your tax dollars at work.
I’m sympathetic, to a point. The BGEN you cited was a contractor; he wasn’t fired, his contract wasn’t renewed or was terminated. When I managed reserves this was a constant problem: the university instructor who always managed to take orders at finals time and never, but never, delivered grades in a timely manner (never mind his getting drunk on an international flight, brawling with the flight crew and declaring “I’m a naval officer and I’m taking over this flight!”); the Ag GS-13 who took her job and immediately disappeared on year after year “involuntary” ADSW orders. And many, many more. After a while, sympathy for reservists got thin because in most cases these employers were left hanging, could not hire replacements without making them permanent accessions, had to keep making retirement/health insurance/other payments for the absent worker. They hired a body to do work, and the body left them.
I met a lot of police officers whose departments were suffering the same problem, having very liberal pro-National Guard and Reserve policies, often paying the officers while they were on military orders for years on end, and accruing time-in-service for promotion and retirement for those officers when they weren’t there serving the force. The USAF were the biggest scammers for this, since USAF reserves can get what are effectively active duty retirements, enabling the USAF/police officer to double-dip for two retirements at the same time.
OTOH, when the Maintenance Officer for VFA-201 was mobilized for OIF, he lost his VP spot with one very major tech firm (it was in the papers that he lost it). His response was that he knew that risk when he signed up for the reserves, and that he couldn’t in good conscience make his company pay for his deployment–it needed a VP for that job, and he couldn’t be it while he was underway.
Nothing is too good for our service members, but we have to give them something.
that being said, Zane is on to somethings: certain parties always seem able to scam the system in ways the rest of us could never do… it was always who you knew.