Veterans Unemployment Figures -- A National Disgrace

According to the US Labor Department, the unemployment rate for young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is 15%, which is more than triple the national average of 4.9%. Just since the invasion of Iraq, the rate rocketed up from an average of 11% for the same demographic. Compare this to the unemployment rate for non-veterans in the same age group, which has dropped from 10% to 8%.

Many of these unemployed veterans are National Guard or Reserve troops who were called to duty but found when they came home that their old jobs were no longer there for them.

Labor Dept spokesman (and apparent BFEE apologist) Charles Ciccolella claims that the problem is not new and that it might show that some of these vets might be waiting to enter school, or have "chosen not to find jobs".

Yeah, uh-huh. They are among the "voluntarily unemployed" and therefore beneath contempt to the ruling class. They think there's no earthly reason to be unemployed in this humming, strumming and cumming WalMart economy of ours. So I guess that these lazy slackers who have come home to suck on the public tit of unemployment insurance think that they are somehow "entitled" to something. Like their old jobs back...

Wait a second. Isn't there something called USERRA -- the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act? And isn't there also something called ESGR, the National Committee for Support of the Guard and Reserve?

So aren't returning veterans given some kind of guarantee or assurance they can return to the old jobs, the jobs they had when they were called up, when their units were activated and sent to the Middle East to protect our "freedoms" and bring "democracy" to the benighted peoples of the earth?

Well, yes and no. It seems that those "guarantees" have more holes than it takes to fill the Albert Hall . Big surprise that the employer class really doesn't have to do anything to give the returning veteran his old job back, if that job no longer exists due to such lame-ass excuses as a "good faith reorganization", blah blah blah.

Just another in a long line of sorry examples of the BFEE screwing over veterans.

I'm actually surprised that they aren't making those lazy slacker getovers in the Walter Reed trauma ward for amputees pay for their own wound dressings.