Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs
Issue 7 - Evidence - October 3, 2012
OTTAWA, Wednesday, October 3, 2012
The Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 12:10 p.m. to study the services and benefits provided to members of the Canadian Forces; to veterans; to members and former members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and their families.
Senator Donald Plett (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
The Deputy Chair: Honourable senators, I declare the meeting in session. My name is Senator Don Plett and I am from Manitoba. I am deputy chair of the committee, filling in for our chair, Senator Roméo Dallaire.
I want to welcome you all to the the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. We are studying the transition of veterans to civilian life. Today we are hearing from a representative of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Kevin Schmiegel. Mr. Schmiegel is Vice-President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Executive Director of the Hiring our Heroes program.
Mr. Schmiegel will provide us with an overview of the American program and will discuss the employment opportunities and support their organization offers to veterans.
Thank you for accepting our invitation. We invite you to make your presentation, and we will have some questions after. The floor is yours, Mr. Schmiegel.
Kevin Schmiegel, Vice-President and Executive Officer, Hiring our Heroes, U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Senator Plett and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear as a witness before the committee and speak to you about veterans' employment and what the U.S. chamber is doing to help our nation's heroes find meaningful employment in the private sector.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation, representing the interests of 3 million businesses and organizations of every size, sector and region.
The reason the chamber is interested in our nation's veterans is simple. Many of our members, companies which include thousands of small, medium and large businesses, want to hire veterans. Even with high unemployment, we have a huge skills gap in America that is hindering our recovery and undermining our global competitiveness.
In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama pointed to 2 million jobs in America that are not being filled right now because we lack a trained workforce.
Veterans can help fill that gap. They have unique leadership experience, advanced technical expertise, are excellent problem solvers and they are extremely reliable. The U.S. Department of Defense spends thousands and thousands of dollars training service members to operate and maintain equipment, and it is a lost investment if we do not repurpose those skills to the private sector.
In the President's own words:
We have trained these folks to nation-build abroad. Now, we need nation-building here at home.
The chamber is raising awareness across the business community of this great pool of potential workers who can help fill our nation's skills gap.
As a veteran myself, it is an honour and a privilege to be here today. In 2009, I retired from the U.S. Marine Corps as a lieutenant-colonel after 20 years of active duty service. I served alongside Canadian Forces as a young second lieutenant in the first Gulf War. From 2003 to 2004, in my capacity as the aide-de-camp to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Jim Jones, I worked with Canadian officers of the NATO military headquarters in Belgium as NATO forces increased presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report entitled "Employment Situation for Veterans — 2011'' showed alarming rates of joblessness for post-9/11 veterans at 12.1 per cent nationally, and particularly for younger veterans under the age of 25, who suffer from 29.1 per cent unemployment. Additionally, unemployment for our National Guard and reserve members sits at 14.1 per cent nationally and soars above 20 per cent in some rural communities.
Data for these cohorts is particularly alarming given the additional 1 million service members who will leave active duty over the next five years and tens of thousands of guards and reservists who will be demobilized and return to the workforce. With the drawdown of our armed forces and significantly higher rates of unemployment for the populations I just addressed, the chamber has ramped up its efforts to enhance private sector job opportunities for veterans and their spouses.
In March of 2011, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched Hiring our Heroes, a nationwide campaign to help veterans and their spouses find meaningful employment, careers in hundreds of cities across America. We started the program in partnership with our own government to improve public-private sector coordination in local communities, where veterans and their families return every day.
Working with our extensive network of 1,600 local chambers of commerce, government agencies at the state and local level, veteran services organizations, not-for-profit organizations and businesses of all sizes representing all sectors, we have led the nation's largest public-private sector coordinated campaign focused on matching veteran talent with career opportunities in the private sector. In our first 18 months, we have hosted 300 hiring fairs in 49 states and the District of Columbia. As of June 30, 2012, Hiring our Heroes has helped more than 10,400 veterans and military spouses land jobs. We have 200 more planned for the next six months, many of which will be on active duty military installations so we can reach transitioning service members before they become veterans.
Beyond our efforts to create a movement to address veteran unemployment at the local level, Hiring our Heroes is launching several initiatives to tackle the systemic issues facing our nation's veterans before they leave the military and search for a second career.
Our focus will shift to leveraging the innovation of the private sector to help transitioning service members and veterans in three areas where we believe critical shortfalls exists. They include: helping them prepare for the civilian workforce by creating and promoting their own personal brand with perspective employers; establishing a strong network in the business community to ease their transitions; and pointing them to the high-skilled and good paying jobs in America's 100 fastest growing job markets.
Hiring our Heroes was founded on two fundamental principles we believe are critically important to the success of a nationwide and sustained grassroots campaign. First, local communities must be the cornerstone of any national program to reduce veterans' unemployment. The reason is simple: When veterans and their families transition from the military, an overriding consideration for them is to get back to a local community where they can be close to family and friends. By targeting resources and leveraging partnerships where we know veterans are — and where they want to be — we can be that much more effective.
Second, we must coordinate the efforts and resources of both the public and private sectors. While there are hundreds of veterans hiring programs in America, it is clear they are not working well enough. In many cases they are duplicative, they compete with one another, and they cause unnecessary confusion for veterans and their families.
In my opinion, hiring veterans and military spouses is a national security imperative for our country. High unemployment for younger veterans, members of our guard and reserve, and military spouses is both a recruiting issue and retention for our all volunteer force. Our first president, George Washington, said once that:
The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans were treated and appreciated by their nation.
How can we expect young men and women to raise their right hands and serve in our armed forces if they face higher unemployment than their peers after serving our nation? Similarly, why should military spouses, who face 26 per cent unemployment in the United States, encourage their husbands and wives to make the military a career and endure long separations and frequent relocations if they cannot achieve their own career aspirations? We believe the United States and local chambers of commerce are uniquely positioned to coordinate public and private sector efforts in hundreds of communities across America.
Working collaboratively with public and non-profit sector organizations and our own network of 1,600 local chambers and 600 trade associations, we will continue to do our part to demonstrate to our nation's veterans and military spouses that their service is not only appreciated but valued, namely by helping them find meaningful careers in the private sector.
I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today and look forward to answering your questions.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much for that presentation, Mr. Schmiegel. We will go to questions.
A number of times you mentioned the spouses, as well as the veterans. Is there any distinction in the priority that you put on one over the other or are they all treated pretty much the same?
Mr. Schmiegel: They are treated the same. My wife served alongside me for 15 years as a military spouse, so we include spouses of veterans who have left the service.
There is a particular focus for us right now on active-duty military spouses. We are going to military installations to help them. Their issues are unique and different from those of veterans. As we did this in the communities, we found that there is a very small population of spouses of veterans and guard and reservists who turned out.
Ninety-three per cent of military spouses are women. They tend not to go to the hiring fair forum. Our approach to this now is to dedicate a program just to them and the unique issues they face.
They are a very transient population while they are on active duty. They are essentially running single-family households for the majority of the time while their husbands — mostly — and wives serve in the military.
We are focusing on mostly larger employers that have career progression and locations all across America so that when they move with their husbands or wives, they will have those types of career opportunities.
We are also focusing on companies that may have telework capability because we think we can place a large number in jobs that way as well.
Senator Wallin: Thank you for your service to country and for the warm embrace we always find from our American allies. We appreciate that when we work in missions abroad.
You are the prime example of this initiative. Out of curiosity, tell us your own story about shifting from the Marine Corps to the Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Schmiegel: I was very lucky. I alluded to the fact that I was an aide-de-camp to a four-star general who happened to be President Obama's first national security adviser. I retired as an officer, and officers do use social networking; they create profiles on LinkedIn and use the technologies that exist.
I was lucky to have a mentor like Jim Jones, who is very recognizable in the United States. I was also lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I had come off a mission in the Middle East working as General Jones's chief military assistant for the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I was introduced to the President and CEO of the chamber. A week after Tom Donohue met me, he asked me to be his senior staffer.
The context for the program comes from not only my experience as a Marine and seeing younger people struggle to transition but, when I was the senior staff at the chamber, I was interacting with CEOs every day. When they learned I was a veteran, they said they wanted to hire veterans. That is where this program was born.
I was lucky. For those who are 25 and under, who are enlisted personnel and those who leave high school and enlist in the military to serve their country, are interacting with employers for the first time. They are not only not as lucky as I was, but they do not have the same know-how in terms of how to transition.
Senator Wallin: I agree with that totally, and I appreciate your generosity in that regard. However, it leads me to a question.
I lived and worked in the United States, and there is a different mindset. I do not know what the statistics are — perhaps you know — but even in the top Fortune 500 companies, the percentage of people who come out of the military officer corps in one way or the other and are employed in senior positions is much greater than we see in this country. There is also a more proactive stance of the chamber there. What do you think accounts for that? What advice do you have for us to try and unstill that in our private sector here? These are folks with skills, trades, leadership — all sorts of things that you look for in an employee that you might not get out of just a simple trades school graduate.
Mr. Schmiegel: First, I will say something that is counter to that. I think younger officers are generally under- employed when they leave the military. Once the Fortune 500 companies see how driven they are, how hard working and see what great leaders they are, those younger former officers progress up the company quickly. However, if you were to do the analysis, you would see that officers who leave are less confident than they should be and they will take less pay to start than they should. That is a lack of savvy.
I think if you look across the nation in the United States, you see CEOs who have achieved great things. There is Fred Smith at FedEx and Alex Gorsky at Johnson & Johnson. If you look at those companies, they were valued inside the companies because of what they bring to the table.
Regarding companies in Canada realizing success in terms of getting success to these officers and putting them in leadership positions, the advice I would give is twofold. One, I think there needs to be cultural assimilation. Younger officers and older officers have served their country for a long period of time and they feel like they have done something meaningful. To be honest, it was very emotional for me to take off the uniform the day I retired. I can remember wondering, "What do I do next?''
I think companies in Canada have a responsibility to attract that talent. When they assimilate them, they want to retain them, so they have to teach them the culture. You can go to any company in America, and the ones that do this the best are companies like General Electric.
Even people who have not served in the military would struggle to explain the importance of a company. A company like General Electric is important to U.S. global competitiveness. A veteran would get that and why that is important to our country. GE does a particularly good job of assimilating.
The second thing is that there needs to be an effort to have affinity groups at those companies that support veterans. "Veteran networks,'' they call them. General Electric has 10,000 veterans in their company — a network of 10,000 people who can support each other and talk about the issues they face. Therefore, when an officer comes from the military — or an enlisted man or woman comes from the military — into GE, there is a warm embrace because there are 10,000 people who have gone through the same thing.
Success breeds success. This affects companies' bottom lines. Because of the inherent trait of loyalty, when veterans see that trait in a company, they are more likely to be retained. Veterans in GE are retained at a rate 7 per cent higher than non-veterans. What does that do? It affects the bottom line of companies like General Electric. When you talk to CFOs and CEOs, the bottom line is important.
That is why cultural assimilation and veterans networks are the two things that Canadian companies can do to attract and retain that talent and help those people achieve leadership positions.
Senator Wallin: Is it your sense that the private sector has understood that concept of "value to bottom line'' in a way where the case did not need to be made by the military as much? I think we need to do both things here; we need to educate employers but also have the military make the case. As you say, there is that lack of confidence, even from someone at your level, to go out and say, "What do I have to offer the private sector?'' Yet if you took your CV to a head-hunter, he would go, "Oh my God, where can we put you!''
Mr. Schmiegel: It is a bit of a Catch-22. Since I can put myself in both sets of shoes, I can say that in the military — and even senior leaders in our Department of Defense — they are focused on the mission at hand, so it is very hard to start to talk to people a year before they transition — or four months or six months — because you want them to focus on the mission at hand.
Put yourself in a lieutenant-colonel's shoes. This is someone who is, say, a battalion commander in Afghanistan and has 1,000 men under his stead. Is he supposed to talk to them about what they are doing next if he wants them to focus on the mission and the lives of the men and women serving under them?
I think that is a real issue. I think our Department of Defense is trying to get their arms around this right now. We have a program where we are trying to re-engineer the Transition Assistance Program within the Department of Defense. The private sector innovates a lot faster than the public sector, so some of the initiatives I alluded to will give service members the tools they need. As someone who has served and is running this national program, I would be more than happy to hand those things off to the Department of Defense.
Jim Jones, who was my mentor in the Marine Corps, told me when I was a major and serving as his aid that everything we do in our country is better if the public and private sectors coordinate. We must coordinate within our own government — the interagency issue — but once you collaborate from the public-private sector perspective, you will achieve much greater results.
I think some of the initiatives we are working on will help service members tell their stories to employers; we are uniquely positioned to do that. However, we are also working on an initiative where we show them where the jobs are in America and who is hiring by industry and sector, so they make informed decisions before they leave. Right now, they are not equipped to do that, so we are helping.
Senator Wallin: You mean that in your current incarnation as "we.'' The Chamber of Commerce is providing that information?
Mr. Schmiegel: Yes, under the Hiring our Heroes banner.
Senator Wallin: Yes. I have many more questions, but I will come back.
Senator Nolin: Good afternoon, Mr. Schmiegel. Some of us are members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and we met your former mentor, or probably still, in Brussels. If you see him, say hello from the Canadian parliamentarians.
Mr. Schmiegel: I will.
Senator Nolin: What is the average time it takes for a veteran to find a job when he or she comes to your program?
Mr. Schmiegel: It varies. Right now, obviously our economy is bad. We track data. This is a very important point, so I appreciate the question.
The core competency of the program has been largely on hiring fairs, but they are not the best method to help service members and spouses find jobs. We see a hiring rate of about 10 to 12 per cent within a three-month period after they come to the hiring fairs. People must understand that hiring fairs are a networking event, so these young people are talking to potential employers for the first time and they realize their shortfalls. The fact that we normally stop measuring after a three-month period does not mean that it did not help them in some way. The transition for veterans is a 90-day period in itself. We are tracking.
There is another set of alarming figures, for younger veterans especially. Normally it takes someone who is transitioning from the military three jobs before they land in a place where they stay for a long period of time, a career. Whatever is happening on the assimilation side when they come back to the communities does not seem to be working very well for younger veterans, and that is where we are starting to track as well, whether the people who have landed jobs have stayed in those jobs.
Senator Nolin: How does your program facilitate the transition to civilian life of veterans suffering from disabilities and other health problems?
Mr. Schmiegel: We have very tailored programs for wounded warriors, their spouses and caregivers, where we go to the installations where they normally transition from and bring a smaller set of employers to interact with them. They do mock interviews, and it is a less intimidating environment. We find those programs work better than the larger scale hiring fairs.
On the other side of that coin, if you look at our forces right now with the issue of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, a large portion of the people who come through the doors to our hiring fairs suffer from some form of disability, either visible wounds or invisible wounds.
Our program is about creating a movement across the country, making this visible and doing it on such a large scale that programs, processes and methods would start to take hold in communities. It is not just about the hiring fair when you fold up the tables, put away the chairs and you look at results from that; it is public-private sector partnership in those communities.
We have a lot of depth. We work with the Veterans' Employment and Training Service within the Department of Labour. We work with the Department of Veterans Affairs. We are working with each of the services in the armed forces: the Marine Corps, the Navy and the Army. We are working with the employer support of the Guardian Reserve, the American Legion and the VFW. We have created such depth at the national level that when we go to the communities, there is an eight- to ten-week process for the hiring fairs, but we bring the state and local leaders together around an event, a hiring fair, to help veterans and military spouses.
The most gratifying thing to see as the head of that program is when those leaders start doing so on their own, without us. They begin asking the question, "Okay, we did a hiring fair; what more can we do?'' That is how you create a movement.
We have been in 300 communities. If one third of them adopts a new program, if they meet twice a month to talk about what they can do to better assimilate veterans and military families into communities, not just on jobs but on health and wellness, on some of the challenges they are facing with post-traumatic stress and TBI, on financial planning and all things that young veterans and their families face when they leave the military, then this program will have been successful. It is not just about the hiring fairs.
On the Wounded Warrior Project specifically, the bottom line is that I think we are reaching a greater population by doing what we are doing on scale, but we have tailored programs for them, which I am happy to share information on.
Senator Nolin: Yes. Can we have access to any documentation you may have available? You can probably send that to our research team.
Mr. Schmiegel: I will.
Senator Nolin: We would definitely be interested to know about the mechanics of it.
Mr. Schmiegel: In the U.S. — I am not sure if it is the same for Canada — there are so many organizations that support wounded warriors that we feel they have the adequate support they need, and we did not want to get involved in a way where we would be duplicative. I said in my remarks that I think there are a lot of programs that are duplicative. Our greatest resource is our grassroots infrastructure and trying to create this movement.
We are starting a pilot program where in locations like Walter Reed and Bethesda military hospitals around the D.C. area, we connect with a dozen or so wounded warriors who leave every month and try to connect them with the local chamber of commerce or a business we have developed a relationship with that has a job or career opportunity in the community they are going back to. That is a key point. Eighty per cent of military families do not settle around their base; they go back to their hometowns or their spouse's hometowns.
Senator Nolin: On the last point, I am quite interested in the spousal program that you have just created. We have the same problem, but the skills of the spouses are not to the degree of the husband. It must be challenging to address such a situation.
Mr. Schmiegel: That has actually evolved. When I first started the program in March of 2011, we fell into the common trap. As a veteran myself, shame on me, but we would say "veterans,'' and then we would just add "and military spouses.'' We kind of lumped them together.
Senator Nolin: It is two different situations.
Mr. Schmiegel: They are completely different. What we did was simple; we found the best human talent and hired her, someone who walks in their shoes every day. I can get up and talk publicly about the importance of hiring military spouses, their strength, their resilience, the fact they volunteer at three times the rate of their peers, the fact that they have led organizations and do not indicate so on their resumés, but instead of doing that, I hired an army spouse. Her name is Laura Dempsey. She is Co-founder and Chair of Blue Star Families, which is one of our country's largest non-profit organizations for military families. She passed the bar four times in three states and the District of Columbia because she has moved with her husband nine times over 15 years. Her husband is deployed to Afghanistan for a third time.
When she talks about these issues with authority, this woman is so incredible in what she has done in the space of years, so she is a testimony of what spouses can do. She was working for two months and formed a military spouse business alliance, bringing nine of the biggest non-profit organizations in America for military families around the table to work collaboratively. Oftentimes you do not see that because each organization has their own interests and in a lot of cases compete with each other. However, she brought them together to do what we are doing, and she planned 20 hiring fairs on military installations, her and just one other co-worker, Noreen O'Neil, who is also an army spouse.
Then she created an e-mentor platform where spouses can connect. They can socially network, but not this heavy relationship with someone who has made it in the business community. It is a touch point. They do not have time to go out for lunch or dinner because they are running single-family households. The site encourages business leaders to join to be mentors, especially women executives in business, because it is not a large ask of them. We are just asking them to connect, and if a face-to-face relationship evolves, then we do so.
That was the best thing I have ever done, and my wife would have killed me if I did not do it, anyway. It is a great incentive.
Senator Day: Colonel Schmiegel, my apologies for being a wee bit late; I had a caucus meeting that ran over time. I have read your material beforehand and I got here for most of your presentation. Actually, my questions are along the lines of my colleagues, so I hope you will forgive me if I repeat something and maybe ask a question from a little bit of a different angle.
The first area that I wanted to ask about is one you were just talking about, and that is active duty military spouses. Does that fit under your program of Hiring our Heroes? Are you calling, and you should be, the spouses, 90 per cent women, the heroes as well, or is this under a different program?
Mr. Schmiegel: Absolutely, it comes under the umbrella of Hiring our Heroes. Listen, I served for 20 years. What my wife did raising three boys was a lot harder than what I did. They are heroes in my mind.
Senator Day: In ours as well.
Mr. Schmiegel: Laura Dempsey and Noreen O'Neil who work for me are heroes, and the hundreds of thousands of military spouses who serve alongside their husbands — 93 per cent of them are wives, are doing incredible things for our country. When I say it, I really do believe it is a national security issue. I would not say it if I did not believe it. The sacrifices they make for our country are not understood by our public. Let us be completely honest and frank. People do not understand what it is like to be away from your husband or wife for a year and raise a family on your own. With all the stressors they have, the sacrifices they make are incredible, but this is not charity. We say this about veterans and military spouses. If you are an employer and you hire a military spouse, you are getting a good deal. If you are an employer and you do not figure out systems to allow them to progress in your company, you are crazy.
Some of the biggest employers of the world, Walmart, for example, hire military spouses and have come on board with a program that we are working on with the Department of Defense called the Military Spouse Employer Partnership. How much sense does it make for a marine spouse who works at a Walmart in Camp Pendleton, California, at whatever level, and is going to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, or Quantico, Virginia, to have to start the process over? It is not good for the spouse and it is certainly not good for Walmart.
Our spouses are one of the most educated populations in the country because a lot of them go back to school because they cannot find work easily. Not only does one in four face unemployment, but there are figures that support 80 per cent are underemployed. That is inexcusable but it is certainly not charity. This is a great opportunity for employers.
With all the part-time work and the transient nature and the fact can you work from home a lot easier than you could before, there is a lot of lost opportunity out there, and the best person I could hire is Laura Dempsey. She is really knocking it out of the park, so we are hoping we gain more and more traction on the issues facing military spouses, but they are heroes.
Senator Day: I agree with you wholeheartedly. Your statistic of 25 per cent unemployment for military spouses, these are military spouses who are looking for work, presumably. Many others have given up looking for work because they have three sons to take care of and they have their hands full working at home.
Mr. Schmiegel: Yes, it is not a pretty picture for spouses. Programs like this deserve equal emphasis. When we deal with the media, and our program is very visible in the media, and when we deal in public forums like this, the focus is generally on veterans. That is why I felt so passionately about not being like all the other organizations and entities out there that say "veterans and military spouses'' and it is an add-on. They need a stand-alone program because the focus needs to be different. We must do something about it now.
Right now we are experiencing a drawdown. Over the next five years the military will draw down. Recruiting and retention will not be as big an issue, but if we do not start addressing some of the challenges that spouses are having with employment, it will be a retention issue.
I served 20 years and 5 days; you retire at the 20-year mark. It took everything I could to get those extra 5 days out of my wife. We executed six moves over a 15-year period and that is not close to some of my peers. My wife is English. I brought her over to this country from the United Kingdom, and then I would go to places for long periods of time.
To go back to the original point, they are heroes, and arguably, if you see what they are doing, more so than those who are serving.
Senator Day: However, you do point out that they have different challenges and it is a different type of employee that the employer may be hiring. In your job fairs, do you handle both of these types of potential employees together, or do you have separate strains in different job fairs?
Mr. Schmiegel: There is overlap with many of the employers. Walmart is interested in hiring veterans and military spouses. A bank like Capital One Bank with teller positions all over the country would be interested in hiring veterans and military spouses. CDS, a retail pharmacy type store, has 7,000 locations, so they would come to the veterans hiring fairs. That was not the issue. It was not an issue of demand, because we could bring the demand from both at the hiring fairs we are doing across the landscape.
The issue was did the spouses come, or did they feel like it was just "and military spouses.'' What we did with the program, with Laura Dempsey's help, is we brought the fairs to 20 military installations, Fort Hood, Camp Lejeune, and across the country, all the services, and showed the spouses that this is just for them. The main issues are the transient nature of the population because they are moving from place to place, and the career portability.
I think it is fine to say that you will give a spouse a job, but we are talking about a lot of people who have bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, PhDs that are taking much less. The underemployment issue is just as big.
They need something to address the transient nature, something to address the flexibility of the family lives that they are leading or flexibility to meet the family lives they are leading, and career portability to help them progress inside companies that are massive organizations. If they work in a Walmart, it does not mean that they have to do the same thing. They can progress in the company because there are so many different opportunities in a company like that. You need to get your national employers involved, and they need to focus on the transient nature of that population, as well as helping them achieve their career aspirations.
The Deputy Chair: You have mentioned Walmart a few times and GE. When a veteran moves, let us say it is a male, and the woman is working at a Walmart, does Walmart or GE or any of these companies make any effort to transfer the spouse as well?
Mr. Schmiegel: More and more companies are doing that. We have a program within the Department of Defense called the Military Spouse Employer Partnership. It was tested in the army for a number of years, and they now have close to 130 large companies, large organizations that support this program; Walmart is one of them. It takes a commitment from the company. Again, I am not the expert here, but they have to be large enough to support that progression, they have to have depth in the company and a number of different opportunities, and they have to be located across the map. They cannot just be in one location.
It is not just big companies. There are hospital networks, too. Many spouses are nurses, and they can benefit from a hospital network that commits to this type of program. There cannot be anything more frustrating for a spouse than doing all the training to become a nurse and be really good at it and then have to start over every time they go to a different community with their spouse. There can be nothing more frustrating than that, especially in the United States where we are struggling a bit, because it becomes even harder for them.
Senator Nolin: I am interested to know if there is any fiscal incentive in place, or is there any need for that to attract the companies? No, there is none?
Mr. Schmiegel: I think for the most part our incentive systems focus on veterans. The tax credits that were recently implemented in the VOW To Hire Heroes Act, which is the United States' attempt to help or incentivize businesses to hire veterans, specifically those who are out of employment.
Senator Nolin: What about for spouses?
Mr. Schmiegel: Not so much.
President Obama recently announced a program, and Michelle Obama and Dr. Biden talked about a program that will focus on certification and licensing for spouses to take some of the skills they have and get the accreditation they deserve. However, in terms of tax credits or financial incentives, that has not happened.
Senator Day: I have two or three fairly short questions. You will let me know if these short questions get longer answers than we were anticipating.
To finish this last line of discussion, we have been focusing on veterans. Your comments are helpful with respect to active service spouses and whether there is a synergy there, and maybe we could be thinking a little broader than we have been. Thank you very much for your comments in that regard.
Mr. Schmiegel: Two other things: First, 40 per cent of military spouses are women veterans. You may want to do a deeper dive on how many military spouses are veterans. If you think about the population we are talking about, they meet their life's mate while they are serving at a young age, and they stop their own service to become military spouses. You should look at that because you are dealing with two populations.
Second, in the same spirit of why I hired Laura Dempsey, we would be willing for her to testify before the committee or to answer any questions that you have separately, if that is helpful to you, and she would do a much better job.
Senator Day: In your comments under the unemployment picture for veterans you indicate that unemployment for members of the National Guard and reserves sits at 14 per cent. Are you talking about retired National Guard? National Guard is a full-time service position.
Mr. Schmiegel: Yes.
Senator Day: You are talking about veterans?
Mr. Schmiegel: No, I am talking about those serving in the National Guard or in the reserves that have recently come back and demobilized. They serve in a reserve in guard status, so they are not always in an active status where they are fully deployed. These are folks who are actually serving in our National Guard and in our reserves. They go to drill a certain number of times a year, normally a weekend a month, and they are like a ready force for America.
Senator Day: They are like those in our militia or our reservists, who are called up for regular full-time service for a short period of time; maybe they go to Afghanistan.
Mr. Schmiegel: Normally someone leaving active duty considers whether or not they will stay in the reserve force. There are folks in the National Guard who serve in active duty on the reserves. There are folks who serve in the National Guard who go directly into the National Guard and serve in that capacity. The strain on the guard and reserve force is not particularly great for America over the past 11 years.
We realize in our program that we have laws to protect guard and reservists, too. It is a law called USARA. If you are an employer and someone deploys — that is, they are in the guard and reserve and they are called up to serve in Afghanistan — the employer is required by law to have that job for them when they come back. What people are not thinking of is what happens on the front end. If you are an HR manager in a big company and you have a percentage of guard and reservists, are you willing to go the extra mile and take on additional people, even if they are qualified? You cannot predict human behaviour, but you know there comes a certain stress point for employers if they take on too many. In a harsh economy, if you take on guard and reservists and they get a job when they come back, what are you doing with the person you employed? Sometimes you cannot accommodate both. There are challenges with that.
The other thing I have not talked about in the program is that small business is critical in our ability to reduce those numbers. In America we will not do this with big business alone. In a lot of local communities that we have gone to, small businesses have been the source of hires. This will not be done by big business because during a recession big companies learn to do more with less. We will be lucky to keep, for the most part, steady state hiring for veterans in some of those companies. We may be able, in the margins, to increase them somewhere, but I think the real answer for us — because the numbers are so large — is with small- and medium-sized businesses. Oftentimes they have not considered hiring a veteran. If they hire one and see the value, then they are likely to hire two. There are 27 million small businesses in America. It makes much more sense that you can solve the problem with 27 million by Fortune 500. We need the Fortune 500 to do that. My strategy was simple: We partner with companies; they support our program. Our program is supported by the private sector. It is funded. That is how we do it. There are no government funds for our program. Those companies are doing it because they want access to veterans. We work with big companies in large part to get them to engage their suppliers, their clients, their customers, their subcontractors. Imagine the potential.
GM and Toyota both support our program. GM's CEO happens to be a veteran. He sent a letter to his 7,100 dealers and suppliers, encouraging them to hire veterans. That means a lot more to me than what GM could hire in their plants. At their dealer conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, the leadership at Toyota got up in front of their dealers and encouraged them to hire veterans. Walmart has tens of thousands of small business suppliers. Big companies are a means to an end. For us — and I am not sure the same exists here — small business is the only way we will address 12 per cent unemployment for post-9/11 veterans, 29 per cent for those 25 and under, 14 per cent for guard reservists, and 26 per cent for military spouses. It is the only way.
Senator Day: Thank you. We are agreeing on a lot of points here.
Before I hand it back to my colleagues, because I am sure they have other items they want to pursue, you mentioned that there were hundreds of organizations in the United States relating to or helping to hire veterans. A year and a half ago, why did you or why did the United States Chamber of Commerce decide to start another one rather than attempt to coordinate the existing ones? The second part of that question is in relation to the Veterans Employment Advisory Council. Explain to us why that advisory council was necessary as part of your Hiring Our Heroes program.
Mr. Schmiegel: With regard to the first question, I can speak from experience. When I left the military in 2009, I went through the Transition Assistance Program. There is a site that you can go to called the National Resource Directory. There are 14,000 organizations in the National Resource Directory for veterans to receive services. You go on that site, but how can you differentiate who is good and who is not good?
On top of that, statistics show that there are another 26,000 organizations, for a total of 40,000 organizations, who claim they are helping veterans in some way. We started the program at the chamber to coordinate efforts with organizations that have the same scale and scope as the chamber. I mentioned government organizations, but we bring in the biggest players — and this is on the small side, too. My thought, as head of this program, is that if you do something meaningful in such a coordinated and collaborative way between the public, non-profit and private sectors, we will get rid of a lot of bad actors. There are people out there who are not doing good things for veterans with the funds they are receiving from philanthropic organizations, from companies or from individuals.
The answer to your question is that I am actually going to help, in some regard, to get rid of organizations that are not doing good things for veterans, by doing things in a way that is collaborative and on such a large and effective scale that they no longer exist.
Senator Day: And the advisory council?
Mr. Schmiegel: The advisory council was actually very simple from the respect that we saw a trend with companies that were going from event to event. When we started this program at the chamber in March of 2011, it was just me and a young woman who helped me with the first hiring fair in Chicago. For five months we did not have any other personnel. We were going from city to city, raising money locally in that city from a company that wanted to sponsor the event, then executing the event and moving on to the next one. We were taking in-kind contributions from hotels, non-profits or venues that wanted to give us the space for free. This is difficult to do city by city.
We looked across the space at the individual industries, sectors and companies that were with us for the first dozen fairs that we did. We asked them if they would join this council and help to fund our efforts. I can tell you that doing 400 fairs costs money. We have 20 people now, too.
When the program first existed at the chamber, we did an annual forum called Business Steps Up: Hiring our Heroes. I am not shy about telling people that this is about the business community stepping up and supporting its nation's heroes. Companies are willing to do it because, first, they know that it is the right thing to do; and, second, they know that it is the smart thing to do. If they are seen as a leader in this industry and are part of this council, they are seen as a leader among veterans and military spouses.
I did a phone call yesterday with all of our members to show what our vision is for next year. We meet three times a year and share best practices. Imagine a time where you look at General Electric's veterans' network and Capital One's veterans' network, where they can start to cross collaborate between industries. Again, I can give you countless examples from these fairs that I have been to. I went to Naperville, Illinois, and I saw seven or eight of the companies on our council there before we stood up the council officially last November. You would see an employer who would have a veteran come up to them and who would tell that veteran, "This company is really not a good fit for you; you should go talk to someone else.'' That is the state that we want to get to where everyone across the business community is working together.
I think that longer term, for your program, there would be the growth of an institute where you would bring in everyone in a collaborative fashion. As we look at all the lead veterans' service organizations, non-profits, and associations — the ones that are really leading this space — some type of coalition or broader association needs to be built so that we can more effectively advocate. Hiring our Heroes is part of a foundation within the chamber. It is a 501(c)(3); it is a non-profit organization within the chamber. I do believe that there is a space in Washington for a coordinated effort between all of those agencies.
The question is: Will people leave their egos at the door to form that type of coalition? We have some of the biggest veterans' service organizations in the world. I think one day, if that happens, we will be much more effective in doing the things that we do. On top of that, you can form some type of certification and vetting process once you bring the leaders to the table to address the issue that we have 14, 000 organizations in the National Resource Directory.
Senator Day: You could also have code of conduct to weed out the ones that are not —
Mr. Schmiegel: Exactly. There are institutions that certify organizations. I am sure that we could figure it out. I think that that is a little bit down the road, but I have been talking to a few people about that as well and think it would be useful.
Senator Day: That is very helpful. Thank you, colonel.
Senator Wallin: I have a couple of follow-up points. First, thank you for taking out the fraudsters. It would be good work to do that; there are too many of them.
You talked about the expectations that your member companies have, in the private sector, of their supplier system. Sometimes that is mandated when it comes to dealing with green suppliers. Is it mandated in any way, or is it just a question of the expectation that you deal with people in your supply chain who share the same values?
Mr. Schmiegel: No, I do not think that any of the companies that we have worked with have mandated it, but it can be —
Senator Wallin: Leading by example.
Mr. Schmiegel: Leading by example and saying that it is valued within the company, especially if you are a small business. We work with some defence contractors. Having a small business know that those values are valued by the parent organization has worked on the defence contractor side. It can work in some of the other companies that we are working with. I think there is a good opportunity there.
Senator Wallin: There are no government funds for your program at all?
Mr. Schmiegel: No.
Senator Wallin: Are the veterans who work still eligible for all their pensions or payments through the system if there is any injury?
Mr. Schmiegel: For?
Senator Wallin: Their pensions, their retirement funds out of the military or any special payments because of injury.
Mr. Schmiegel: None of that is affected by our program. Not at all.
Senator Wallin: When you talk about the transitioning members and the vets and say that you are looking for civilian jobs for them, is that on-base, off-base or both? Are you doing some of that in those pre-stages, maybe when they come back from deployment and you know that they will be out in a year?
Mr. Schmiegel: Yes. More and more of our hiring fairs will be on the bases, but we will bring employers that have a national footprint because 80 per cent of them are going somewhere else. It is not hard for some of the bigger companies that have a local presence around a base to send a regional recruiting manager, but, generally speaking, they have opportunities elsewhere in the country. The other thing that we are doing is called the Fast Track program, which I addressed in my remarks about the systemic challenges. I was head of enlisted assignments and retention for the Marine Corps for a couple of years. I was responsible for the 60 HR managers who assign and retain 170,000 marines worldwide. I interviewed 5,000 young marines a year about their decision to stay in or leave the Marine Corps. Three out of four marines leave after their first four years. When I asked them what they were going to do next and thanked them for their service, they would say, "Sir, I do not know what I am going to do. I am going to go home and figure it out when I get there.'' That is not a good plan. We are building a program called Fast Track. Everyone is trying to bite the whole apple. Do not bite the whole apple; take one bite. We did some research with an organization at Syracuse University called the Institute for Veterans and Military Families. We mapped the 100 cities in America that are forecasting the greatest job growth. They are showing sustained growth, and they are forecast to grow over the next five to 10 years. Then, we identified the industries and sectors that are driving growth. It will not be a million jobs, but it could be 200,000. They are for skilled work. They are high-paying jobs, and there is a desperate need in those companies. We will start bringing this map to the hiring fairs, and we will do it online in an interactive way. If geography is driving their decision, show them the map. If you have a kid going to the heart of Texas where there is 20 per cent unemployment in some rural community, help them to make an informed decision and say, "Have you looked at Houston? Have you looked at Dallas where there is growth?'' Then it affects the GI bill, which is their education decision. They can use their GI bill for a year or 18 months to get a certification, a licence or a credential at a community college and then get a good-paying job, support their family and then go to school at night to get their bachelor's degree. That is not happening in the Transition Assistance Program.
Seventy-one per cent of the people who come to our hiring fairs — employed or unemployed — say that they will not relocate for a job. It goes back to the thesis that geography is driving everything they do. Show them where the jobs are and who is hiring them and drive them to the critical path to employment. Where do they use their GI bill? We are building a whole system that will be released next week. Show them the map and the industries first, the places with jobs. The third phase will show them what they need to do with their GI bill to get a credential, license, certification or an apprenticeship program to get a good-paying job. That is a game changer.
Senator Wallin: It certainly is. Let me ask the flipside of that because I read a very interesting article on this recently. We have some of the same issues in this country. I think your number was three out of four who were leaving. That is an issue. The military is spending a lot of tax dollars training up employees for these companies if they are leaving that quickly. Is there some other way to rationalize that system early on? I think about our own airforce. Why not bring in the airlines that inevitably end up taking those skills workers and have them participate in the training cost up front?
Mr. Schmiegel: Absolutely. Not only that but also I think there should be an effort at their schools. While they are in the military there is an initial entry level school, which costs taxpayers thousands of dollars. Then there are advanced courses for people who stay and get out at the six, eight, ten-year mark. We should bring the private sector in to get them the credentials that they need at the school. America has a shortage of 200,000 drivers. It is forecast to grow by 500, 000 over the next ten years. I am sure there is a shortage of drivers here. We have people who have driven seven- tonne trucks and heavy equipment in the military. We have people with incidental driver's licenses. The chief difference between getting a military driver's license to drive a truck and an eighteen wheeler is backing up. We jump out of the back of the truck and guide someone to back up. You cannot tell me, in the United States of America, that we cannot get someone a commercial driver's licence while they are at mode of transport school in the military. Canada should look at the same thing.
Senator Wallin: We make them wait the same way. You can be accredited as a fighter pilot, but you cannot fly a Cessna.
Mr. Schmiegel: We have medics saving lives on the battlefield, and they have to wait a year before becoming an EMT.
Senator Wallin: This is a very important issue. Thank you for shining a light on it.
The Deputy Chair: Mr. Schmiegel, we appreciate you coming out here today. It has been enlightening. Clearly you have a great program, and we can learn from that. If there anything further that you feel that we can benefit from, please send it to us through the clerk. We would be happy to see that.
(The committee adjourned.)