Category Archives: In the News

US Veterans Pay Heavily for War

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By  Chris Adams

WASHINGTON – Ten years after the United States went to war in Iraq, one of the most common numbers associated with the conflict is the tally of Americans killed: nearly 4,500. Add in the twin war in Afghanistan, and the tally goes to more than 6,600. * The Iraq toll includes 199 Ohioans, while 76 Ohioans have died so far in Afghanistan. * But for the men and women who served in America’s war on terror, the number of people affected is far larger. And for many of those people, the impact of the war will last a lifetime.

“I give presentations all over the country, and audiences are routinely shocked and surprised at the numbers,” said Paul Sullivan, a former senior analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs who handles veterans outreach for Bergmann & Moore, a Washington-area law firm that specializes in disability issues. “Quite often, they will challenge me.”

Since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, about 2.5 million members of the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard and related Reserve and National Guard units have been deployed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, according to Department of Defense data. Of those, more than a third were deployed more than once.
In fact, as of last year, nearly 37,000 Americans had been deployed more than five times, among them 10,000 members of guard or reserve units. Records also show that 400,000 service members have done three or more deployments.

“When I say 2.5 million people have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, jaws drop,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the chief executive officer of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “I know which lines are going to get gasps, and that’s one of them. I don’t think they appreciate how many people have served, and particularly the number who have had repeated deployments. “You’ve had an unprecedented demand on a small population. The general public has been incredibly isolated from those who served.”

For those who did serve, the effects of the war could linger a lifetime, according to a review of VA documents.

Already, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced more disability claims per veteran than other wars on the books, including Vietnam, Korea and World War II. While Vietnam extracted a far higher death toll – 58,000 died in that war – the total number of documented disabilities suffered by recent veterans is approaching that of the earlier conflict, according to VA documents.

As of last September, more than 1.6 million military members who’d been deployed in what’s classified as the global war on terror – in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily – had transitioned to veteran status, VA records show. Of those, about 1 million were from active-duty service and about 675,000 from reserve or guard deployments.

And of those, about 670,000 veterans have been awarded disability status connected to their military service. Another 100,000 have their initial claims pending, according to a November VA analysis.

Those numbers are constantly climbing – and might continue to rise for decades.
According to Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University professor who’s written extensively on the long-term costs of the wars, the ultimate bill for war costs comes due many decades later. As veterans age, their health deter-iorates and their disabilities – which might have been manageable early in life – worsen.

In a paper released on Thursday, Bilmes notes that the peak year for paying disability compensation to World War I veterans was 1969; the largest expenditures for World War II veterans were in the 1980s.

Today’s veterans are far more likely to put in for benefits than their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations were. Beyond that, far more soldiers in this all-volunteer military have been back for multiple tours, and the long-term impact on hearing and from traumatic brain injuries caused by improvised bombs will be felt for years.

The VA’s disability benefits are awarded to veterans who suffer physical or mental injuries during their military service. They range from $129 a month to $2,816 a month. Separate from the disability payments, veterans have access to the VA’s health system, and so far more than 860,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have taken advantage of it.
Among the most pressing – and potentially costly – disabilities is post-traumatic stress disorder, which can have a dramatic impact on a veteran’s life. As of last year, the VA’s

health system had seen more than 270,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for potential PTSD, and the agency’s disability system had awarded PTSD benefits to more than 150,000 of them, according to VA reports.

In her paper, Bilmes says the cost of providing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with disability and medical care and related services will approach $1 trillion; it might top that if the number and complexity of claims continue to grow.

New technologies open job opportunities for injured veterans

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By Leo Shane III
Published: October 18, 2012 in Stars and Stripes (http://www.stripes.com/)

WASHINGTON — When Pfizer was considering sending some administrative jobs overseas, Merry Korn convinced them to outsource them to wounded veterans instead.

Korn, owner of Pearl Interactive Network said she currently has four home bound, injured veterans working as administrative assistants for the pharmaceutical company, handling scheduling and office management for corporate officials from hundreds of miles away. The feedback so far has been so good the company has approached her about finding more veterans to work as remote employees.

Korn said technology has advanced so dramatically in recent years that jobs one thought closed off to severely disabled individuals can now be done off-site without aggravating the veterans’ limitations.

“The veterans we’re dealing with, if they can’t work from home then they can’t work,” she said. Some have injuries to limbs or to eyes that make travel difficult. Others have post-traumatic stress disorder or similar challenges that make working in an office unbearable.

PIN has about 40 disabled veterans working from home now, a small subset of the company’s contracted workforce. The work includes call center and human resources tasks, and flexible hours depending on the company.

“It’s still a business,” she said. “They expect to get people who will excel, people who are highly motivated and can deal with complicated interactions.

“But companies want to hire these veterans. They know there are skilled and talented disabled veterans out there.”

CEO of Pearl Interactive Network, Inc. completes Tuck-WBENC Executive Program

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Merry Korn, CEO of Pearl Interactive Network, Inc. completed the 2012 Tuck-WBENC Executive Program, an intensive weeklong executive learning experience held at IBM’s Learning Center in Armonk, NY, along with 50 other women entrepreneurs earlier this month. The Tuck-WBENC Executive Program, which was established in 2003 and has been sponsored by IBM since then, stemmed from an idea to create a program tailored to the needs of women business owners. Today it offers step-by-step tactics designed to help women entrepreneurs grow their business with a focus on improving strategic planning, organization, resources, and systems and processes.

Tuck is the nation’s oldest graduate school of business and is renowned for its collaborative learning approach. The Tuck-WBENC program is designed to prepare the business owners to think differently about how they approach and operate their businesses. To enhance the relevance of the experience, the course used Pearl Interactive Network’s business plan as a case study in the curriculum. Pearl Interactive Network expects to reap immediate benefits from the marketing, financial and organizational strategies taught in the class.

Pearl Interactive Network, Inc. is a for-profit social enterprise that provides staffing for home based or client site administrative services and contact center positions. Their workforce is comprised of disabled veterans, veterans, military spouses, veteran caregivers and people with disabilities.

Pearl Interactive Network, Inc. has been WBENC certified since 2009, which is one of the pre-requisites for applying to the program. The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) is the leading authority on and advocate for women-owned businesses as suppliers to the nation’s premier corporations and government entities. WBENC certifies women-owned businesses with a world-class, rigorous process recognized by corporations and government agencies, and is authorized by the Small Business Administration to certify Women-Owned Small Businesses (WOSB). The WOSB Program provides government-owned procuring agencies a tool to help meet their WOSB contracting goal of 5% of prime contracting dollars being awarded to WOSBs.

“The Tuck-WBENC Executive program is an exceptional opportunity for women business owners to examine their business plan, strategize for growth and network with other prominent women in business” stated President and CEO of WBENC, Pamela Prince-Eason. “The caliber of the Tuck faculty

To learn more about Pearl Interactive Network visit us at www.Pearlinter.org.

Health & Disability Advocates Lauds New Labor Dept. Proposal to Boost Hiring of Qualified Workers with Disabilities

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HDA’s Think Beyond the Label provides tools and resources to help employers recruit prospective job seekers with disabilities

REPRINT 2/22/12 from Think Beyond the Label

CHICAGO–Health & Disability Advocates, the parent organization of Think Beyond the Label, a public-private partnership that connects businesses to jobs for people with disabilities across the U.S., strongly supports a proposed Department of Labor rule to require federal contractors and subcontractors to set a goal for hiring qualified people with disabilities to 7 percent of their workforce.

“For far too long, businesses have publicly stated their interest in hiring people with disabilities, but for a variety of reasons they have not acted on that interest,” said Barbara Otto, CEO of Health & Disability Advocates. “The proposed rule will provide further incentives for businesses to hire, and with proper guidance and enforcement, will facilitate the increased employment of qualified workers with disabilities.”

Such a move would amend regulations of Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act to bring employment of people with disabilities in line with federal contractors’ other obligations, which include hiring women and minorities.

While Otto calls the proposal a “step in the right direction,” she says more work needs to be done to improve federal contractors’ hiring practices to reflect the growing number of Americans with disabilities, who represent nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population. “We believe the Labor Department should raise the hiring goal for qualified workers with disabilities to 10 percent, given that the 7 percent goal is based on the 2009 American Community Survey and captures a considerably narrower set of people with disabilities than is covered by Section 503 and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” she says.
“Raising the hiring target should also come with more options for businesses to meet that goal, ensuring their ability to succeed,” Otto adds, such as a phased-in hiring approach based on the number of employees and the size of the federal contract.

Think Beyond the Label says businesses can readily meet their workplace diversity goals through a mix of disability-friendly outreach, recruitment strategies and workplace initiatives. Otto provides the following tips to employers:

 

  • Conduct outreach to the entire population of job seekers who are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers who only recruit candidates that are using the publicly funded training system to find jobs, such as vocational rehabilitation, will miss out on an entire population of job seekers with disabilities who are not likely to use, or may not qualify for, publicly funded training and employment services, such as a recent college graduate with a learning disability.
  • Post open positions across multiple channels that target all types of qualified candidates with disabilities, including Gulf War Era II veterans with disabilities. Job seekers with disabilities apply for jobs just like anyone else – on the Internet, on job boards and with placement agencies. In fact, Think Beyond the Label recently launched an online jobs board that lets job seekers directly interact with employers who are looking to recruit people with disabilities. The portal tracks and reports job-seeker traffic to aid employers’ recruiting efforts.
  • Use social media and direct marketing to capture the interest of job seekers with disabilities. Not all private employers will fall under the Department of Labor’s proposed rule. Even if it’s not about compliance, when companies are looking for the best candidate they should always cast the widest net possible and include candidates with disabilities – and hiring managers can reach them on Facebook, LinkedIn or through the websites they frequent like Think Beyond The Label.
  • Foster a disability-friendly environment. A company can demonstrate the ways in which they support people with disabilities by including a disability statement on its website, hosting disability awareness training, and creating an employee affinity group for people with disabilities. Companies also can partner with organizations that promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

HDA has submitted its response to the Department of Labor with comments now available:
http://www.thinkbeyondthelabel.com/Blog/post/HDA-Comments-to-Section-503.aspx

Counting People with Disabilities

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By Guest Blogger Matthew Brault, Statistician, Health and Disability Statistics Branch, U.S. Census Bureau<http://www.census.gov/>

As most visitors to this blog are aware, the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990 represented a major milestone. The law guaranteed equal opportunity for people with disabilities in public accommodations, commercial facilities, employment, transportation, state and local government services and telecommunications. A common question, however, that still pops up during discussions of disability policy is, “How many people with disabilities are there in the United States?”

Coinciding with the 22nd anniversary of the ADA, the Census Bureau released a new report – Americans With Disabilities: 2010<http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p70-131.pdf> – that presented a new look at the prevalence of a wide range of specific disabilities, the degree of severity and the well-being of the population with disabilities. The report showed the number of people with disabilities increasing over the previous five years to 56.7 million people in 2010 (54.4 million in 2005), while the proportion of the population with a disability remaining unchanged at 18.7 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population.

The Americans With Disabilities: 2010 report also shows the prevalence of specific disability types. For instance, about 8 million adults had difficulty seeing; 9 million adults had difficulty with an activity of daily living (ADL); and 4 million adults had a learning disability. Furthermore, disability is often co-occurring with around 11 million individuals experiencing both physical and mental disabilities.

Measuring disability in surveys, however, is not an easy task and different surveys can generate very different estimates of the size of this population. “With a disability” in one study may not be the same as “with a disability” in another. Depending on the definition used, the context of the questions or methods in which the data are collected, estimates of the size of the population with disabilities have ranged from 22 million (from the American Housing Survey<http://www.census.gov/housing/ahs/>) to 62 million (from the National Health Interview Survey<http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis.htm>).

The Census Bureau report’s estimate of 56.7 million people with disabilities come from the Survey of Income and Program Participation<http://www.census.gov/sipp/> (SIPP), which uses a comprehensive set of disability questions assessing difficulty on a number of dimensions including communication, physical and mental functions.
Disability statistics from this survey are used by agencies – such as the Social Security

Administration<http://www.ssa.gov>, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services<http://www.cms.gov> and the Administration on Aging<http://www.aoa.gov/> – to assist with program planning and management. The SIPP measure has been the primary statistic for estimating the size of the population with disabilities since the early 1990s.
Disability and functioning are continuums ranging from “able to do most or all basic activities with little or no difficulty or help from technology or another person” to “completely unable to do most or all basic activities, even with assistive technology or other aids.” Under this gradient, most people fall somewhere in between. We use categories like “with a disability” and “with no disability” to make it easier to describe the population, even though the threshold for how much difficulty constitutes a disability may not be clear.
Perhaps some of the difficulty in defining disability along this continuum is also found in the issue of choosing which activities should be included in the disability measure. The American Community Survey<http://www.census.gov/acs/www/> (ACS) – a great survey for looking at the social, economic and housing characteristics of subnational geographies like states, counties and metropolitan areas – uses questions on six specific types of disability. With fewer dimensions of disability, the ACS shows a smaller number of people with disabilities (36 million, or 12 percent), but provides statistics at more localized levels.
Researchers, advocates and policymakers should be aware of the reasons for the different estimates of the number of people with disabilities in the U.S. No one survey estimate is “right” or “wrong” as all surveys must make choices about the type and nature of disability they intend to measure. With the SIPP’s comprehensive set of questions on various disabilities, the Census Bureau<http://www.census.gov/> (and many across the federal government) have used Americans with Disabilities report estimates, like the current estimate of 56.7 million people with disabilities, and so it is widely accepted as the measure of the size of this population.

For presentation slides and more information from a July 27, 2012 C-SPAN segment on the Americans With Disabilities report, visit http://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/disability/.

 

Matthew W. Brault is a statistician with the Health and Disability Statistics Branch in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. For the past seven years, he has studied the social and economic characteristics of people with disabilities in the United States, including the prevalence of disability across geographies and population subgroups. He has written several reports and papers about this population – including the recently released “Americans With Disabilities: 2010″ – using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the American Community Survey. Brault received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from George Washington University and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown U

Pearl mentioned in article: Military vets aren’t protected class, but Supreme Court case makes suing employer easier

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Premium content from Business First by Craig Lovelace | For Business First

Military veteran Mark Conwell now works in human resources at ODW Logistics warehouse on Williams Road. The changing environments military members face on the battlefield, he said, helps them prepare for all the change that happens in the corporate world.

Ask Mark Conwell if military veterans should be a protected class as it relates to workplace discrimination laws and you get an answer that is part from the heart and part practical.

“That is a hard question to ask. I am biased because I am a veteran, so I would say yes. But on the other hand … you risk opening Pandora’s box,” said the U.S. Army veteran who is a human resources supervisor for the temporary staffing arm of Columbus-based ODW Logistics Inc.

Protected class status is based on factors that can’t be singled out for discrimination and harassment such as religion, age and sex. This status is given to Vietnam-era vets.

The notion – patriotic or financial – of hiring veterans returning from service is gaining steam. JPMorgan Chase & Co. , for example, has launched an effort to hire 100,000 vets by 2020.

In March of last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began its Hiring Our Heroes program, a nationwide effort to help veterans and military spouses find meaningful employment.

But there can be misconceptions about a vet’s mental state and the inability of some of them to accurately relay how their military experience will translate into the workplace.

“I do believe veterans are a little bit discriminated against,” said Daniel Hutchinson, director of Ohio Combat Veterans, a nonprofit that aids veterans’ transition from military to civilian life by helping them get their benefits, find jobs and providing support services. “Every employer thinks returning vets have (post-traumatic stress disorder.) When they look on the application and see the person is an active or on reserve, they get pushed to the back of the pile.”

Merry Korn of Pearl Interactive Network LLC, whose company supplies disabled personnel – 65 percent of whom are veterans – for government and private contracts, goes a step further. She believes many employers think disabled vets are mentally challenged.

Military veteran Mark Conwell now works in human resources at ODW Logistics warehouse on Williams Road. The changing environments military members face on the battlefield, he said, helps them prepare for all the change that happens in the corporate world.

That’s wrong, she said, noting they are valuable employees because they are disciplined, can adapt easily to a fluctuating environment, have high retention rates and have a sense of loyalty.

Discrimination regulations

Federal laws protecting workers from discriminatory acts by their employers are mostly enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Former military personnel – as well as those serving as reservists or in national guard units – are afforded protections and have an added layer known as the Uniformed Service Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994. The act prohibits employers from discriminating against veterans based on their military service and ensures uniformed service people can return to their jobs in the private sector following an absence for active duty or training.

U.S. Department of Labor statistics for fiscal year 2010 show a total of 1,438 new cases under the act were filed, a number consistent with the previous five fiscal years. Another 3,202 cases were referred for reviews based on investigations by the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, an ombudsman and outreach program through the Defense Department and with employers.

The outcome of those cases is not reflected in the data, but a Columbus attorney said discrimination and harassment complaints based on one’s military service aren’t prevalent now.

“We have had issues regarding people wanting to come back to a job and dealing with that,” said Jim Petrie, a partner at Bricker & Eckler LLP .

Petrie said avoiding cases where any employee feels discriminated against is rooted in training. Bricker, he said, provides its corporate clients with a lot of training and auditing, keeping managers updated on the relevant laws aimed at preventing discrimination and harassment.
“When employers get into trouble, they are just ignorant of the law,” Petrie said.

Last year, however, the Supreme Court issued a decision that makes it easier for military members to sue private employers for discriminating against them based on hostility to their service.

According to a summary of the case, Staub v. Proctor Hospital, by the global law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, Vincent Staub was a member of the U.S. Army Reserve who was employed by the hospital and had to complete drills one weekend a month and full time two to three weeks a year. Staub’s immediate supervisors were hostile to Staub’s military obligations, feeling they were a strain on the department, and fabricated a work rule violation to justify a “corrective action” against him. Four months later, one of the supervisors informed the hospital’s vice president of human resources that Staub had violated the “corrective action” and he was fired.

The court held that an employer is liable to an employee under the Uniformed Service

Employment and Reemployment Rights Act if a supervisor performs an act against an employee that’s motivated by antimilitary hostility, the supervisor intends to cause a bad employment action against the employee and that action actually happens.

For those wounded in service, another protection, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It prohibits private and state and local government employers with 15 or more employees from

Breaking barriers

Legal issues surrounding how vets should be treated in the workplace are likely to become more important as more hiring occurs.

That’s because employers are finding advantages in hiring vets. President Barack Obama late last year signed into law the Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011 that expands the pool of vets whose hiring by private employers could result in a tax credit of thousands of dollars.

Korn said she’s hearing more often that companies are open to hiring vets.

“Somewhere along the line, private contractors are starting to recognize that there are a lot of benefits in hiring veterans and that it makes good business sense.”

Korn uses call centers, for which her company supplies a lot of workers, as an example.

“A lot of traditional call centers are going home-based and domestic, and they are looking to hire veterans,” she said. “They have high retention rates, the companies need home-based workers, and the disabled have to work.”

At the national level, Military.com, a subsidiary of Monster.com, is partnering with larger companies such as Home Depot, Amazon.com and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to boost the recruitment of veterans into the work force.

The company employs functions such as a translator who takes the skills a veteran learned in the military and explains them in language used by human resources departments and hiring mangers.

Failing to accurately translate those skills is a huge barrier for veterans, said Randy Plunkett, director of community and government outreach for Military.com.

“Neither group knows the other group very well,” he said. “When you are in the military, you have your own culture, your own language.”

Hard workers

Ken Altiero owns Patriot Seating in Austintown, a company that upholsters and assembles office chairs. He said a benefit of having veterans on staff is that they don’t complain.

Patriot hires only vets at the enterprise Altiero started in tribute to his brother James, a disabled veteran who fought in Vietnam and works for the company near Youngstown.

Altiero, whose clients include Columbus-based Continental Office Environments and one of the area’s hospital systems whose name he declined to share, said the vets work quietly and diligently.

He relays an incident when Patriot’s building was without heat during the winter. Feeling guilty watching them work all bundled up, Altiero apologized to the staff. The staff, in turn, said the cold conditions weren’t a big deal compared with what they experienced overseas.

ODW’s Conwell said changing environments are part and parcel of the military experience. It serves the transitioning vet, like himself, well in the private sector, making it easier to adapt.

“It did prepare me for organizational chaos. You have to be flexible,” he said.

Over in Dublin, software developer Halcyon Solutions Inc. is trying to encourage veterans to learn the tools of its trade that founder and President Mohan Viddam believes will make them more marketable and fill a need in the IT world. The company recently began a five-week training session with a group of vets preparing them for work in the industry.

“Many of them surely worked with computers and have the analytical skills. Plus, they are hard working,” Viddam said.

The goal, he said, is to provide the training, hopefully partner with local companies and then hook them up with jobs.

A native of India who has been in the U.S. for three decades, the American citizen said he wants to pay back the country that has afforded him so much.

“That’s why this first batch is so important,” he said. “I want to see that this type of training can work.”