A Word About Veteran's Employment

As North Carolina’s servicemen and women return from protecting our freedoms around the world, many are coming home to a job market that is anything but welcoming.

In January of 2009 my wife and I moved to Raleigh, following my last deployment, to Afghanistan.  While I had a college degree, over 15 years of military experience, six on active duty, and a resume that reflected both military leadership and civilian management experience, I still struggled to find meaningful employment.  I volunteered for a start up veteran’s charity that currently remains unable to pay their employees.  Additionally, I served as press secretary to a local political party.  And yet none of my connections or efforts helped me to score a career oriented job.

I worked for a few months managing a holiday store, eventually I took a private security job that required downsizing our family budget and stressed my marriage but enabled us to stay afloat.

Today, veteran unemployment—at 10 percent—is two full percentage points higher than the national average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have the hardest time finding work.  Here in North Carolina alone, more than 40,000 veterans are currently without jobs.
The government has responded to the problem of high unemployment among veterans with ineffectual programs narrowly targeting unemployed veterans. Sadly, this has not done enough to help our veterans—and there’s no shortage of news reports telling of the fate of hundreds of thousands of vets who are frustrated and disheartened at being shut out of the work force after returning from deployment.  The government needs to focus on implementing broad pro-growth policies to get the economy moving again for everyone.  As John F Kennedy reflected fifty years ago:  “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
To make matters worse, planned cuts to defense, scheduled for 2013 and beyond, will only worsen the problem.  Officials estimate that the U.S. Army could see layoffs of up to 24,000 enlisted personnel, including up to 5,000 officers, while the U.S. Marine Corps could shrink by some 20,000.  This means more young veterans will soon be competing for work, in a very tough jobs environment.
In addition to the lack of job security in the military and lack of opportunity in the economy in general, veterans face a culture of waste and inefficiency at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that results in long waits, delayed benefits, mishandled documents and poor service to veterans.  Currently, the VA has 890,000 pension and compensation claims that remain unfulfilled—a number that has more than doubled since 2008. Today, it takes 240 days to process the average claim—60 days longer than a decade ago.
Runaway government spending makes it all the  more difficult to address these problems in the future.  In a nationwide Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) poll conducted in late September, 72 percent of veterans named the economy and the debt as their top concerns in 2012.  These veterans recognize that a weak economy and towering national debt only serve to compromise our nation’s long-term security.  This leads to a continued lack of opportunity for work and prosperity for military families as well as the country in general.

We can do better than this. We must do better.

CVA is bringing attention to these and other issues facing our country’s returning service members — many of whom have had little say in our country’s leadership because of dysfunctional military voting procedures that disenfranchise service members.  The “We Can Do Better” bus tour, slated to swing through North Carolina on October 22-23, will allow veterans to hear directly from leaders in the veterans’ community about these and other critical issues.

We at CVA invite you to join us, whether on the road or at the ballot box, in urging Washington to focus on a comprehensive agenda of fiscal restraint and pro-growth policies that allow businesses to expand and create jobs by holding the line on taxes, cutting burdensome regulations, and getting out of the way of the private sector.

We owe our military servicemen and women better.  We can do better.  Join us in urging our leaders to deliver the future that North Carolina’s 765,900 veterans, and all Americans, deserve.

John Byrnes is a writer, a veteran and a member of Concerned Veterans for America.  He served in the USMC in the 1990s, and was deployed to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope.  He returned to service in 2000 When he joined the New York Army National Guard.  He was deployed to Ground Zero on September 11 2001, and has since served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He currently serves in the North Carolina Army National Guard, and lives in Raleigh with his wife.

Learn more at: http://concernedveteransforamerica.org/.

Originally printed in the Fayetteville Observer:
http://www.fayobserver.com/articles/2012/10/21/1211431?sac=fo.opinion