Government has failed to protect reservists who lose jobs

WASHINGTON — For tens of thousands of members of the National Guard and reserves who are called up to serve in Iraq, returning home safely may be the beginning — not the end — of their worst nightmare. Reservists lucky enough to make it home often find their civilian jobs gone and face unsympathetic employers and a government that has restricted access to civilian job-loss reports rather than prosecuting offending employers.

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act protects members of the guard and reserves from job loss, demotion, loss of seniority and loss of benefits when they are called to active duty.

The act is supposed to protect reservists' civilian jobs for up to five years of military service. But the government has made it difficult for veterans to enforce their legal rights. Service members who return to find their civilian jobs gone also find that the burden is on them to prove that their jobs were taken away as a result of their military service and that there is no other reason that they could have been fired.

This onerous burden of proof discourages many from filing formal complaints.

Despite such bureaucratic hurdles, more than 16,000 reservist complaints were filed between 2004 and 2006, the Government Accountability Office said this year. But fewer than 30 percent of the reservists who experience USERRA violations file complaints, the GAO estimated.

Those who do file complaints with the Veterans Employment and Training Service Department find that resolving their complaints, by the military's own admission, can take "months, if not years." A declassified Defense Department memo compiled for military lawyers stated: "Many VETS field investigators simply accept whatever the employer tells them in a response and close their files" rather than continue an investigation, meaning the reservists never receive assistance. A 2005 GAO report found that the average time service members have to wait for USERRA complaints to be resolved is 619 days — nearly two years.

Complaints that cannot be closed are referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, but few cases make it that far. In 2005, of the 5,302 complaints filed by reservists, 111 cases were referred to the Justice Department. Only 16 resulted in benefits going to reservists.

The Justice Department special counsel in charge of prosecuting veterans' job cases, Scott Bloch, declared before Congress in May 2005 that he had "zero tolerance for violations of USERRA" and would "enforce the law vigorously." He promised lawmakers that the Justice Department would do better.