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Hiring bias linked to veterans’ joblessness

The high unemployment rate for young veterans is largely the result of hiring discrimination against National Guard and reserve members, says the president and chief executive officer of a company that helps veterans find jobs.

Ted Daywalt of VetJobs.com, a job-placement website partly owned by Veterans of Foreign Wars that has 127,000 resumes in its database and 42,000 available jobs, said he believes the hiring discrimination is the reason why the unemployment rate for veterans aged 20 to 24 years old was 30.9 percent in August.

“The high unemployment rate of young veterans is a direct result of their participation in the National Guard and reserve,” Daywalt said in a written statement provided Tuesday to a veterans’ employment summit hosted by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

“If a veteran has totally separated from the military, retired or is a wounded warrior, they are for the most part finding employment,” Daywalt said. “If a veteran remains active in the National Guard or reserve, they are having a difficult time finding meaningful employment due to the constant call-up schedules.”

The problem, he said, is that employers are reluctant to hire people who might be called up for extended periods.

“VetJobs has been receiving calls from veterans and transitioning military who are concerned about employers asking during an interview whether the candidate intends to join the National Guard or reserve,” Daywalt said. “Candidates inherently know that if they say ‘yes’ to joining or rejoining the National Guard or reserve, they will not be hired.”

Representatives of the National Guard Association of the United States agree with Daywalt’s conclusion.

“It is true that employers appear reluctant to hire members of the Guard and reserve components, but it is very hard to prove,” said Pete Duffy, the association’s deputy director for legislative programs. “Employers are not stupid. They’re not going to say you are not being hired because you are in the Guard. How do you prove any kind of discrimination, especially when the employer has a stack of resumes and have the chance to be picky?

“But how else do you explain the current level of [veterans’] unemployment?” he said.

The law allows employers to ask about an applicant’s military service, but the Reserve Officers Association has been pushing for a change in the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act that would prohibit specifically asking about whether a person is in one of the reserve components.

John Goheen, an NGAUS spokesman, said some people have told him they have avoided mentioning their Guard affiliation until after they are hired to prevent discrimination. That may not work, though, if an employer requires job seekers to complete an application that directly asks about military service.

“This is an issue where it’s kind of hard to get your arms around it,” Goheen said. “The unemployment numbers tell you this is something of a problem, but there is no proof.”

The Justice Department is looking at many complaints involving the USERRA law, which prohibits job and hiring discrimination against reserve component members and veterans, but most of their cases involve re-employment complaints — reservists who already have jobs encountering difficulties in returning to those positions after deployment. Those types of violations are easier to spot, Duffy said.

Daywalt, who has been analyzing veterans’ unemployment reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said most veterans aged 24 and younger are National Guard members. He draws that conclusion because people who join the military at age 18 typically serve for four to eight years, so they would be older when discharged.

The unemployment rate for veterans 24 and younger began to rise rapidly in 2007, he said, when it jumped to 22.3 percent. In 2010, it averaged 20.6 percent.

The job outlook for Guard members should improve as the pace of deployments declines for Guard units, Duffy said, but in the meantime, he said he regularly hears from guardsmen who say they are working part-time or holding down several jobs at once because they cannot find permanent work.