Employers must support Reserve and Guard who are helping in this crisis

Most any civilian employer of a member of the Reserve or National Guard will tell you that “busy” is the order of the day with these men and women. The operational tempo — “optempo” — of our reserve components, the Pentagon term for the Reserve and Guard, never has been higher, except perhaps during World War II.

The drawdowns in Afghanistan, if the treaty with the Taliban holds, won’t affect the optempo.  Late last year, reflecting on the global situation, a three-star general on the staff of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff flatly told military groups in the Pentagon that the tempo isn’t decreasing in the foreseeable future.

A chief warrant officer who is an Army Reserve engineer told me he recently returned from his third Iraq deployment in nine years. He’s a project manager in his civilian engineering firm.  Although he volunteered to be in the Army Reserve, he hadn’t volunteered to deploy again — but of course went without complaint. His “home-to-war” ratio of time is little different from that of a “regular” soldier’s.  He’s concerned about his viability in his civilian job.

More than 1 million members of the Reserve and National Guard have been activated since 9/11; nearly 1,300 of them have made the ultimate sacrifice for us. The optempo is about to get higher for many of our citizen-warriors who put everything on the line for the nation; they are ready to leave at short notice all they love — their families, jobs and communities — to serve us.

The Reserve and National Guard have been activated to provide medical and logistical support to state governments contending with coronavirus. The president has announced that Reserve Component activations will increase over the next few weeks. In some cases, they were barred entry to bases that had implemented restrictions; our organization, ROA, worked with the Pentagon to get them the access they needed. So, that general in the Pentagon was right on the money.

Here’s what we can do, especially if “we” employ or manage a member of the Reserve or National Guard: give that hero all the support you can — and we recognize that with the closures, your business may be hurting, maybe badly hurting.

Here’s an example of what we can avoid doing: In 2016, a U.S. air carrier failed to reinstate an Air National Guardsman after he returned from military training, ultimately firing him. The Guardsman had notified his employer of the training and, court documents show, had the employer’s permission.

There is a federal law, the 1994 Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), which helps protect the jobs of reservists who are activated. It’s not perfect, and it is not-infrequently flouted. We are seeing evidence that some employers may avoid hiring a member of the Guard or Reserve because their military duties may result in absences, a violation of USERRA. 

Back to the case of the airline refusing to reinstate the Guardsman: a federal judge found in the Guardsman’s favor, ordering the airline to pay $170,000 in attorney’s fees and expenses. More servicemembers’ employment rights cases can be found on ROA’s law center website.

This citizen-warrior was fortunate: The federal government hasn’t the resources to litigate every alleged USERRA violation. So, as in so many other aspects of society, we depend on the civil conduct of citizens to “self-enforce” the spirit of the law.

The spirit is simply this: Our nation utterly depends on the young men and women who agree to underwrite our freedom with their very lives. The least we can do is support them in substantive ways — in this case, ensuring their confidence that they will have the means to make a living.

That means preserving their jobs for their return, ensuring they are promoted and recognized at a rate commensurate with any other employee’s similar performance, and making it explicitly clear to one and all that they are valued both as employees and as citizen-warriors.

Many American companies, large and small, privately owned and publicly held, are doing exactly that. They know who they are, and they have our deepest appreciation. More important, they have the loyalty and respect of the citizen-warriors in their employment ranks.

Doing so may be very, very difficult, especially in a small business or firm. But doing anything less is just flat wrong for America.

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey E. Phillips retired from the U.S. Army with 37 years of service and now directs ROA, a Washington-based nonprofit that supports the military’s Reserve and National Guard units. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.