Deployed Military Veterans Enjoy Stronger Job Protections

Deployed military enjoying stronger job protections
By John Andrew Prime

Pictured left: Sgt. Jim Taliaferro was deployed with the Air Force Reserve’s 917th Wing and was able to return to his job at the Shreveport Police Department.

Barely weeks after the smoke cleared from the devastation wrought on the East Coast by Islamic terrorists in September 2001, Jim Taliaferro doffed the blue uniform of Shreveport police for the camouflage BDUs of the Air Force Reserve.

Well more than a year later, he returned to find his job awaiting him — something thousands of Louisiana military personnel freshly sent to Iraq hope will be their lot when they come home this summer and fall.

“I was activated in October 2001 and returned in January 2003,” said Taliaferro, a Vietnam War Navy veteran who’d joined the Air Force Reserve’s 917th Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base in 1990, the same year he began working with Shreveport police. “Being deployed put a hardship on patrol, detectives. But the overall atmosphere was very supportive. They realized we had a job not only here but a job in the military as well.”

Until the start of World War II, time away from a job, even for a soldier in uniform, often meant a topple off the job ladder. At best, a rehired veteran likely would lag far behind past peers in terms of pension, promotion and choice of job assignments.

But because of a body of law now 65 years old, those who must balance civilian careers and military obligations have one less thing to worry about while dodging bullets and bombs: their next paycheck after Uncle Sam tells them they’re civilians again.

The downside: Revisions since the Persian Gulf War are being tested and interpreted even though challenges have been few and generally far removed from the local area.

The Selective Service and Training Act of 1940 protected employees drafted into service and almost immediately was amended to protect those who volunteered as well, according to former Labor Department attorney Samuel Wright, a Naval Reserve captain who co-authored the decade-old latest revision called the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. Long known as the Veterans Re-employment Rights Act, it wasn’t tested or revised too many times between the Korean and Persian Gulf war since the Guard and Reserve largely were left out of the Vietnam War, he said.

“Then in August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait and the first President Bush started calling up Guard and Reserve members in their first significant use since the Korean War,” Wright said. “All of a sudden, it became a major issue.”

That was because recruits tended to come in right after high school or some college while Guard and Reserve members more often were older and from more settled lives.

“Our experiences utilizing the VRRA after the Gulf War indicated that it was past time to update the World War II era statutory protections for returning veterans to reclaim their jobs and get their lives back on track,” said John Odom Jr., a Shreveport attorney and recently retired Air Force Reserve colonel and judge advocate. With Wright the author of Law Review entries on USERRA for The Reserve Officers Association, Odom said congressional enactment a decade ago of the latest revisions “codified nearly 50 years of court decisions on veterans’ re-employment rights and added significantly to the enforcement mechanisms available to reclaim civilian jobs by the men and women who were willing to put their lives on hold to participate in the defense of the nation.”

Changing national demographics also impacted the thrust of the law. Roughly 60 percent of the work force belonged to a union when the first laws were enacted in 1940. Today, that number is less than 10 percent, Odom and Wright said.

“It’s creating some really difficult situations when someone comes back and wants a position of ‘like seniority and status,'” Odom said. “When the employer’s promotion decisions are not based solely on seniority, it makes it something of a challenge for the returning veteran and (his/her) employer to agree on exactly what position the employee would have obtained absent (their) absence for military service.”

Issues such as bonuses — not generally a hot topic with 18-year-olds but certainly on the minds of 37-year-old executives called up by the Guard or Reserve for say, two years — are a “really challenging piece of the puzzle,” Odom said.

“Should he be compensated for ‘bonus’ production despite the fact that he was only there for three months of (a) year?” Odom posed. “Of course, his absence from the employer was only because of his military service.

“On the other hand, if he was one of the employer’s top producers for each of the three years prior to his call-up, is it likely that he’d have just stopped producing all of a sudden? No,” he said. “We’re taking the position that if bonuses are a part of the expected compensation package, an employer should look to the employee’s ratings and production for some period of time before he left for military service (three years, for example) and pay a bonus based on previous average production, or some similar formula. USERRA and the Department of Labor’s new proposed regulations don’t spell out how to proceed in this type of case. And more and more people have their compensation packages tied to bonuses.”

Odom said this will become “a huge issue for a lot of our more senior Guard and Reserve folks, many of whom are in their 40s and 50s and at the peak of their earning potential when they get mobilized for two years.”

The great question mark is that the issue hasn’t arisen locally because the largest number of those called up from civilian life — in northwest Louisiana mainly in the Bossier City-based Bravo Co., 1/23rd Marines, and the 1/156th Armor Battalion based at Fort Humbug in Shreveport — are deployed. Re-employment issues arise after a veteran returns and asks for the job back along with raises, promotions and perks.

“So far,” Odom said, “we have not had a great deal of trouble here.” And, he added, “big employers have human resources departments and generally know what the law is.”

Ironically, he said, the worst offender is the federal government, primarily the Bureau of Prisons.

“A lot of prison guards are Reserve and Guard members. Prisons are staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And when these guys get called up, it creates holes in the duty roster.”

Cary L. Chandler works at the U.S. Postal Service station in downtown Shreveport and has been with the mail service nearly 34 years. Now 58, he served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam from 1966 to 1970 and, as a member of the then-Bossier City based 527th Engineer Battalion, was deployed during the Persian Gulf War.

“The Postal Service saved my job for me, but I was only gone for six months,” the Bossier City resident said. “I got the exact same job when I came back. But they gave me an extra week of vacation time when I came back. They were really nice about it.”

Chandler said it was better than his return after Vietnam. Then, he came back to his earlier job with a local manufacturer but with most people grumbling at him due to the public sentiments about that conflict. “When we came back in 1991, we were treated like heroes, not like when came back from Vietnam.”

Contrary to popular belief, the law does not guarantee a return to the job you once may have had.

“The law gives you a right to re-employment in the position you would have had had you been continuously employed,” Wright said. “Especially if you’re talking about a long period of time, things might have changed for the better or the worse.”

So if everyone from your department was laid off and replaced by a robot, you might not have a job — unless your job was the only one targeted.

Or you might find yourself in the position of Danny Robinson of Bastrop, who returned from a two-year Navy stint in Vietnam promoted four levels.

“I left as a pure laborer in the sheet-finishing room at International Paper. Two years later, I found I’d skipped bailer operator, roll cutter, sheet finisher and another position I forgot. I was a trimmer operator and wondering what I was doing. When I left, I knew how to operate a broom.”

More likely today is the situation of Cameron “Lance” Magee, an attorney and former Shreveporter who is a captain on the command staff of the 1/156th Armor Battalion, deployed in Iraq and on a long-term leave from his employer, West Law Publishing, part of Thomson Corp.

“I’m the Baton Rouge representative for this Minnesota-based corporation. And they’ve guaranteed my job upon my return and allowed me to maintain my benefits while I’m away,” said Magee, who is married and a relatively new father.

“As good as (the military’s) Tricare is, Aetna’s better,” he said. “I’ve received numerous care packages from my Dallas regional office. And they’re even paying me a salary differential to offset my loss from activation. (They’re) definitely ‘Employer of the Year’ in my book.”

Also new under USERRA, litigation is handled by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and a cohesive staff of centralized specialists.

“They pay a lot more attention to it,” Wright said. “It’s no longer farmed out to the 93 U.S. attorneys.”

The best thing demobilizing military folks can do is send a politely phrased — but formal — letter to their employer saying they soon will be out of service and plan to return to the workplace, Wright said. A model letter is on the Reserve Officers Association’s Web site under Law Review article 77.

“There’s no legal requirement to do that, but it’s a good idea,” Wright said. “And send it by certified mail so you’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.”