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Where are all the jobs?
BY CHERYL L. REED STAFF REPORTER, March 26, 2006
In two tours in Iraq as a Marine sergeant, Angelina Summerfield supervised up to 50 switchboard and radio operators whose job was to monitor U.S. spy planes and report sightings of roadside bombs.
Now back in civilian life and living in Blue Island, Summerfield, like thousands of other veterans returning home after serving in Iraq, is finding it tough to get a job despite her military experience.
“I’ve filled out dozens of applications,” said Summerfield, 28. “They say you need a college education to do these jobs. Yet I was a supervisor in the military.”
Veterans have historically had a higher unemployment rate, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, that rate has been climbing dramatically since the beginning of the war in Iraq.
She has been scanning the classifieds, interviewing for security jobs and hunting for work at a couple of malls, where she applied for security work and also to be a sales clerk or a cashier. “I’m not even good at retail,” she said, “but I’d do it for a paycheck.”
Summerfield said she has faced tough challenges before and come out fine: She boxed in the Marine Corps’ women’s league, winning seven of 10 bouts. But, after three months on unemployment, she said, “I’m finding it hard to adjust.”
Three years into the war in Iraq, Americans who leave the military are coming home to face a problem most never expected: Veterans are having a hard time getting hired.
It’s a national problem. But it’s affecting some vets more than others. Hardest hit are the youngest vets — whose unemployment rate is the highest since the early 1980s — and those trying to find work in the Chicago area and the rest of Illinois, according to the U.S. Labor Department, which distributes $161 million a year to subsidize states’ efforts to help veterans get jobs. Illinois state officials question the Labor Department figures. But, even by their reckoning, the state still ranks among the nation’s worst at finding jobs for vets.
Nationwide, the unemployment rate for veterans between 20 and 24 years old was 16 percent last year — compared with a 9 percent unemployment rate for non-vets in that same age range. Overall, the nation’s unemployment rate last year was 5.1 percent.
“In a strong economy, these numbers don’t fit,” said Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who chairs the Senate’s Veterans Affairs Committee.
Recruitment ads boast that those who enlist will learn job skills in the military.
“It’s a very shrewd, sophisticated marketing strategy,” said Robert Bruno, a professor at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It doesn’t bear any real significance to the marketability of someone coming back into civilian life.”
Skills learned in the military often don’t translate to civilian jobs, vets and labor experts say — unless the job seekers also have college degrees and work experience.
“The jobs that are offered veterans suck,” said one state veterans employment representative, speaking only on the condition that his name not be used because his agency ordered workers not to talk with a reporter. “They are coming home to a society that wants to pay them $9 an hour, with no benefits. And they cannot afford to live on that. Employers are not taking into consideration their military experience.”
Why it’s so hard to find a job
Among reasons vets’ unemployment is higher today:
*This war hasn’t boosted the nation’s economy like past wars have, creating civilian jobs. Heavy employment among war veterans in past generations had more to do with the economy than patriotism, Bruno said. When vets came home from World War II and Korea, they found a greater demand for labor generated by those wars, he said.
*Fewer corporate managers today have personal connections to the military and so are less likely to highly value the skills learned in the military, Bruno said.
*There’s a stigma in the eyes of some employers about vets in an era when psychological problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder is far more commonly diagnosed. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a military study this month that found that 35 percent of those who have returned from service in Iraq have sought mental health services.
*More than ever, experts say, employers are looking for workers who have demonstrated skills that tie directly to the job. Vets might have skills, even leadership experience, but that isn’t always enough to convince skittish employers.
“The military might have taught them skills such as dealing with war and weaponry,” said Lane Knox, who heads Illinois’ veterans employment representatives. “Of course, there are no demands for that once they are released from the military.”
Illinois’ job efforts faulted
In Illinois, which gets $6.5 million a year from the federal government to help veterans find work, 34 percent of unemployed vets who sought help from the Illinois Department of Employment Security found jobs last year, according to the U.S. Labor Department, which ranks Illinois as the worst state in the nation for getting jobs for vets.
“It makes me angry, and it’s discouraging to thousands of veterans in Illinois who have served their country,” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said. “We can’t afford what appears to be mismanagement of a program that is vital in making sure veterans can support themselves.”
Illinois employment officials dispute the Labor Department’s rankings. They point to new data that show the state is doing better. Even so, the Illinois program would rate better than those in only seven other states for helping uninjured vets find work last year — and better than those in just four other states at getting jobs for disabled vets.
Indiana ranked near the top for helping vets get jobs — and No. 1 by a measure that looked at how long vets hold on to those jobs.
Defending state’s record
Illinois’ veterans employment representatives also maintain that younger vets here are more likely to choose to go to college rather than keep looking for permanent employment — especially when they realize how limited their job prospects are without a college degree.
In the last five years, the number of veterans using GI Bill college benefits nationwide has risen 20 percent. But in Illinois, it has gone up more than 53 percent. A key reason: This is one of the few states to offer veterans four years of college benefits, in addition to what they get through the federal GI Bill.
In some cases, Illinois Department of Employment Security workers say, veterans register with the agency’s Illinois Skills Match computerized job bank but have no intention of taking a job. Instead, they plan to live off their GI Bill money — $1,034 a month — while their state education benefits pay their college tuition. “A lot of our younger veterans went into the military so they could get benefits to go to school,” Knox said. “They don’t want to work. But if someone’s taking statistics, all they see is this person is not working.”
A bigger problem, according to the state agency, is poor tracking. Illinois doesn’t require Social Security numbers when veterans register for jobs on the state’s job bank — which they say makes it more enticing for vets to sign up, for privacy reasons, but impossible for the state to track whether a vet finds work.
At Summerfield’s home in Blue Island, her job-hunting troubles strike her father as history repeating itself. Marvin Summerfield says he found many doors closed when he returned from serving in Vietnam as a Marine in 1969.
“Nobody wanted to talk to you,” said Marvin Summerfield, 58. “Employers would say, ‘We’ll get back to you.’ Everyone was suspicious. They didn’t know if you were psycho and going to grab a gun and shoot someone.”
After six months of looking for work, he says he got hired as a salesman — on commission — at a Loop printing business. “I don’t expect them to be more open to veterans now,” he said. “Nobody’s going to give a veteran the edge just because they served in a foreign country.”
‘All a smoke screen’
When Michael McCoy returned from Iraq to Chicago Heights in April 2004, he saw yellow ribbons and American flags everywhere. “I thought I would have an upper hand [compared] to everyone else in the world,” he said. “I thought it would look good on my background. I was wrong.”
McCoy’s job in the Army was ordering parts for military vehicles. He hoped his Army job training would help him find similar work as a civilian, but potential employers told him he would need a college degree. Now he feels duped, saying of the Army’s recruiting pitch, “It was all a smoke screen, this stuff about them training you for a job.”
McCoy, 24, signed up for unemployment benefits and registered on Illinois Skills Match. Many of the jobs listed on the state job bank are for unskilled labor. Earlier this month, the database listed 27,857 job openings. Four percent were management positions. Vying for those jobs were 12,611 veterans and 97,148 civilians.
Fighting a stigma
It took McCoy five months to get a job — which he found on his own — as a UPS package handler, making $8.50 an hour, with no benefits, and just part-time. But that was OK with McCoy, who plans to use his military education benefits to get the credential other employers told him he needs — a college education.
One problem McCoy realizes he faces is dealing with the psychological repercussions of his experience in Iraq. Recently, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder — a common condition among Iraq war vets, according to the military study’s findings released earlier this month.
Employers “look at you the wrong way,” said McCoy, who now sees a Department of Veterans Affairs therapist. “You’ve been to war, and they think you’re a dangerous guy.”
State veterans employment representatives — many of whom are Vietnam War veterans — call it the “crazy vet stigma” and counsel vets on how to avoid being stigmatized by it.
Reginald Whitley, an Illinois veterans employment representative, recently coached Summerfield on how to deal with an interview for a job doing undercover security. Summerfield wanted to play up her extensive experience with weapons. Whitley shook his head.
“You shouldn’t mention the weapons,” he told her. “It might make them a little nervous.”
Published originally by SUN-TIMES
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