Hempstead and the Military

From Journalism80

Project

This page is part of an enterprise story that examines the relationship between Hempstead, NY on Long Island and the U.S. Military.

Background

LEDE: The country has already started to see the effects of the War on Terror on our military personnel and the war is not yet over. Last month reports broke about the poor medical care that Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were receiving and recently veterans have reported returning to their employers only to be told they no longer have jobs.

NUTGRAPH: Although the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act was established in 1994 to protect the jobs of reservists, the act is not always enforced. So, organizations outside of the Veterans Affairs office are trying to help veterans reassemble lives that they left to serve in the War on Terror. Locally, HempsteadWorks, a department of Workforce New York and the New York State Department of Labor, offers services to veterans looking for work.

• According to Veterans Today, the Department of Defense has mobilized over 500,000 reservists since September 11.

• According to an article by Maximillian Potter in 5280 Magazine, the military’s employer-support office is a disaster caught up in bureaucracy.

• A Government Accountability Office report released in 2002 said that the Department of Defense needed to improve relations between reservists and their employers yet another recent report by the GAO shows that the U.S. government does not understand the troubles reservists face upon returning from war.

I plan to call the HempsteadWorks Office tomorrow to set up an appointment to see someone next week, tomorrow if possible. I also plan on calling Hempstead Veterans Services tomorrow to see if they know whether their vets have a hard time locating work upon returning from war.