HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The unemployment rate among military veterans who served after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks remains stubbornly higher than the general population, especially for the youngest men to leave the service, according to a congressional report released Tuesday.
The Memorial Day-themed report cites new federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data and suggests that one major reason for the high unemployment is that post-9/11 veterans were more likely to be employed in industries that were hit hardest by the recession.
"The skills and work experience those veterans receive while on active duty make them better matched to civilian employment in certain private-sector industries," said the report, written by the ranking Democrat's staff on the Joint Economic Committee, Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey. "However, this distribution of employment left recent veterans vulnerable to the massive job losses of the Great Recession."
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Before the recession began in December 2007, post-9/11 veterans were more likely than nonveterans to be employed in mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, information and professional and business services, all industries that lost a significant number of jobs in 2008 and 2009. These veterans were far less likely to be employed in education and health services, the only major sector in which payrolls expanded during the recession, the report said.
The data, which was not seasonally adjusted, shows April's unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans was 10.9 percent, above the unemployment rate of 7.7 percent for all veterans and 8.5 percent for non-veterans. The numbers are almost unchanged from the 2010 unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans, which was 11.1 percent.
April also continued the trend of high unemployment for male veterans who are 18 to 24. It was 26.9 percent, well above the 17.3 percent unemployment rate in 2010 for non-veterans of the same age group.
Nearly 2.5 million men and women have left active duty in the Armed Forces since September 2001. Four-fifths of them were men and 83 percent were aged 25 to 54.
The report calls for passage of a bill in Congress that would require all departing service members to take part in the federal Department of Labor's job-search program and fund a study to identify which civilian jobs are most closely matched to jobs held by active-duty service members.
It also warns that job-training and employment programs for veterans must be improved to avoid a repeat of the experience of Vietnam War-era veterans, whose labor force participation rate has dropped significantly faster in the past decade than that of nonveterans. In 2000, the rates were similar for the two groups
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