Veterans’ unemployment falls
The Veterans’ Benefits Administration released new figures which shows that veterans’ unemployment numbers are improving;
Attached is our monthly ‘cheat sheet’ for your use and information. The national unemployment rate for April 2017 decreased slightly from 4.5% to 4.4% and the Veteran unemployment numbers for April 2017 decreased from 3.9% to 3.7%.
Thanks to all of you who are working directly or indirectly, to ensure our Veterans have meaningful employment.
V/R
Curtis L. Coy
Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Opportunity
Veterans Benefits Administration
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
The Military Times reports that veteran employment is at an all time high;
The record low for post-9/11 veterans comes after a slight uptick in unemployment between February and March. The volatility of the month-to-month figures is one reason critics of the monthly U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment data say not to put too much stock in the numbers. The data are based on a monthly Current Population Survey, which calculate the veteran unemployment rate from a much smaller sample size than the overall rate.
The unemployment rate for nonveterans in April was also 3.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for Americans overall also dropped slightly, as the U.S. added a total of 211,000 jobs last month, primarily in the hospitality, food service and healthcare industries.
Category: Veterans in the news
Good. A positive note has been struck. Glad to see it.
The unemployment numbers for post-9/11 vets were always (somewhat) falsely inflated, just based on how we were deploying. My reserve unit came back from Iraq in May, with a boatload of college-age kids either looking to begin school or return to their studies. These guys had at least 15 months of employment in the Army, so they qualified for full unemployment benefit; they had a deployment’s worth of tax-free money earned somewhere that spending it was difficult, so they weren’t hurting for money; they were definitely ready to spend some time decompressing; and they only had maybe 12 weeks to give to an employer before classes started. So a bunch of them went on unemployment, made a desultory job search, brought in $300-$400/week in unemployment, and started up school in the fall.
Without a doubt, there are vets who need job training programs, who are struggling to find a good job, etc.; but I never believed there was an epidemic of them. But there was a constant flow of Joes with REFRAD/ETS in hand and college on their minds buoying those unemployment numbers.
And on the flip side, I don’t know if this is pat-ourselves-on-the-back time either, if the decrease is driven by fewer mobilizations and not by systemic improvements…
The following is the URL of an article which describes the real unemployment rate in the USA:
https://timemoney.com/unemployment-rate/
The article suggests that unemployment rates can be manufactured and be extremely misleading at to the real situation of unemployment. A large proportion of the American citizenry is unemployed, inclusive of military veterans.