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Senators urge passage of bill to help vets find jobs
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04/02/11 10:30 AM ET
Two senators continued to press for passage of a bill to help veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan find jobs as the group's unemployment rate slowly declines.
The unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans dropped for the second straight month in March to 9 percent for all veterans. The rate fell to 10.9 percent for veterans who have served on active duty since the 2001 terrorist attacks, down from 12.5 percent in February and 15.2 percent in January, according to the Labor Department.
Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a measure in February that extends the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to include members of the Guard and Reserve, which have experienced double-digit unemployment, and makes the credit permanent for veterans.
“While I am encouraged by the improved unemployment numbers for our returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, they remain disturbingly high,” said Hagan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats. “I will continue working with my Senate colleagues to ensure the hard-earned knowledge, skills and dedication of these veterans are translated into job opportunities in the civilian world."
For those veterans who've left the service since 2001, the jobless rate for females is 7.5 percent, more than a percentage point below the national average, while the rate for male vets is 11.6 percent, down from 13.3 percent in February.
More than 213,000 vets were still unemployed in March, according to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), a non-profit organization that advocates for veterans' issues.
Several U.S. companies, including Cisco, AT&T, Verizon and JPMorganChase, have pledged to hire 100,000 veterans and military personnel leaving active duty by the end of 2020. Other U.S. companies, big and small, should follow this lead, Hagan and Brown wrote in an op-ed in Politico on Thursday.
This week, more than two dozen veterans with IAVA met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden at the White House and representatives from the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, about improving the job situation and lowering the unemployment rate for veterans.
“If you want to support the troops, support veterans, hire them,” Paul Rieckhoff, IAVA's founder and executive director, said in a statement.
Rieckhoff's group proposed a legislative package that includes job training and transition assistance for vets, tax credits for employers that hire vets and a comprehensive study of how military skills translate into civilian jobs.
"We had a very productive conversation with administration officials about concrete steps the private and public sectors can take to create jobs for veterans," he said. "In the coming months, we look forward to working with the President and First Lady to bring critical attention to this issue and lower the new veteran unemployment rate by Veterans Day.”
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