GETTING VETERANS BACK TO WORK: CUPATIONAL LICENSING LAWS ARE KEEPING TURNING SERVICEMEN AND THEIR FAMILIES OUT OF THEIR CHOSEN FIELDS.

AuthorBoehm, Eric

WHEN THE UNITED States invaded Iraq in 2003, Eric Smith was a 17-year-old sailor. Over the next five and a half years, he was twice deployed to the Middle East as a Navy medic, serving as a corpsman for a platoon of Marines who found themselves in combat on multiple occasions. When he wasn't deployed with the Marines, Smith led a four-man team responsible for a 20-bed intensive care unit.

Those years of hard-earned leadership and medical training under extreme conditions, Smith believed, would leave him well-prepared for a job in a civilian hospital when it came time to leave the Navy. "I was told I would be wanted in the civilian workforce because I had proven myself a reliable leader," Smith recalled in 2011, after two years of struggling to find a full-time job. "That did not prove to be the case."

About 200,000 people leave the United States military every year. Some separate after completing their terms of service, others are wounded or disabled, and still others are retiring. For the majority, a crucial part of the transition to civilian life is finding a job. Like Smith, many struggle not because they lack the needed skills but because they don't have mandatory certifications or state-issued occupational licenses, some of which require years of redundant training in skills already provided by the military at taxpayers' expense.

The Navy had spent more than $1 million on Smith's training over the course of nearly six years in the service, but as a civilian he was able to land only part-time work. Often he ended up hanging out near a convenience store in Baltimore where day laborers were hired for off-the-books construction. When he eventually got a job in a hospital, he worked as a janitor.

"My military education and training did not translate because I didn't have a piece of paperwork saying so," Smith told the U.S. Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in 2011.

That hearing drew attention to the issue, and it built momentum for the Veterans Opportunity to Work to Hire Heroes Act, or VOW Act, which President Barack Obama signed in November of that year. Among other things, the law authorized the departments of Defense and Labor to work with governors to identify occupational licensing rules that could be streamlined for former members of the military.

Progress has been slow. In April, nearly six years after Congress passed a major piece of legislation that supposedly addressed the licensing problem plaguing veterans, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was sitting in another committee hearing addressing the exact same problem. The military trains thousands of soldiers every year to drive trucks in the most difficult conditions imaginable, she pointed out, but state licensing rules mean "we can't take the world's best truck drivers and just automatically move them into truck driving jobs, civilian truck driving jobs."

"We've got a state and national licensing problem here," Warren concluded. She's right. As the 16th anniversary of America's war on terror approaches, the slow pace and uneven results of that conflict abroad are mirrored by a similar slog back home.

Reform efforts backed by Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, the federal departments of Defense and Labor, the National Governors Association, and various veterans groups have pressured state lawmakers to change dozens of licensing laws. For anyone hoping to enact broader reforms of America's often anticompetitive occupational licensing rules, there are lessons to be learned from the push to loosen requirements for current and former members of the military. Those successes provide a blueprint for how the federal government can play a role in occupational licensing reforms at the state level.

But the slow pace of progress raises concerns. If it is this difficult to make small changes to licensing laws for military families...

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