With the nomination of Thomas Perez (the son of Dominican immigrants) as Labor Secretary on March 18, President Obama called on him to continue Administration efforts to help returning veterans find jobs. This comes on the heels of the President’s State of the Union pledge that 34,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will return home by next spring, and the end of the war by late 2014, which means the U.S. job market will see roughly 68,000 troops seeking work.
So what can they expect?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on March 8, that unemployment had dropped to 7.7 percent in February 2013, whites at 6.8 percent, blacks at 13.8 percent - only slightly lower than the 14.1 percent rate of February 2011, though black teens are extremely high at 43.1 percent.
The unemployment rate for all veterans was 6.9 percent in February - a drop from 7.6 percent in January 2013, and slightly lower than the national average. For post 9/11 veterans, the rate dropped to 9.4 percent from 11.7 percent in January, but the youngest veterans (ages 18 to 24) show unemployment rates at 36.2 percent. For all black veterans, the unemployment rate in February dropped to 7.1 percent from January’s 9.8 percent, while it hovered at 8.7 percent for post 9/11 black veterans.
However, those percentages illustrate only part of the picture. According to a February 25 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, veterans deployed overseas for prolonged periods struggle to find work not only because of war trauma, but also due to training that does not translate well into the private workforce.
And a March 6 Washington University study suggests that mental health issues and socioeconomic status also impacts returning vets, concluding that low-income communities remain disproportionately at risk. While the study focused on local Afghans’ mental health in the war-ravaged region, the implications are applicable to U.S. enlisted men and women; socioeconomic issues such as poverty and status are possibly more important risk factors for mental illness than exposure to war.
Ultimately, those veterans who cannot find or hold onto a job may end up homeless. Although accurate counts of homelessness are impossible due to the transient nature of the population, the numbers do show that over 50 percent of all homeless veterans are African American, yet they only represent about 10 percent of the veteran population, and 45 percent of female veterans are black, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
Homeless vets are not a new issue: In 2009, President Obama anounced his goal to end all veteran homelessness by 2015 because veterans are more likely to become homeless than the general population, accounting for nearly a quarter of all homeless people, though veterans only comprise 8 percent of the population, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.
According to the U.S. Veterans Administration, the number of homeless veterans rose to 26,531 in September 2012, in contrast to 10,500 in 2010. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s December 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress estimated there were 62,619 homeless veterans on a single night in January 2012 and more than twice that were at risk of homelessness.
While joining the military is customarily viewed by African-American men as a means to escape poverty, University of Delaware associate professor of sociology and a Gulf War veteran, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, writes in his 2012 book Disposable Heroes: The Betrayal of African American Veterans: “For a grossly disproportionate number of African American soldiers, the end of military service signals a return to a largely unforgiving civilian world that has little use for them.”
For the younger and more racially diverse group of Afghanistan war veterans, the economic insecurities they may face can be made worse by the mental stress of combat that easily escalates into a vicious cycle of poverty and puts them at risk of homelessness.
Next year’s homeless numbers will tell the entire tale.