Rep. Jeff Miller's House Veterans Employment Bill Passes

House easily passes veterans employment bill
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Oct 12, 2011 21:26:34 EDT
The House of Representatives on Wednesday night overwhelmingly passed a veterans’ employment bill that hopes to put 400,000 or more veterans to work in the next two years.

If that happens, the jobless rate for veterans would drop from about 8.1 percent — a rate 1 percentage point less than the national unemployment rate — to 5 percent or lower.

Called the Veterans Opportunity to Work Act, or VOW Act, the bill would not create jobs. Instead, it would:

• Tweak programs helping current service members prepared for post-service life.

• Create a job retraining program for up to 100,000 veterans between the ages of 35 and 60 who have been unemployed for 26 weeks or longer.

• Attempts to get states to relax or modify licensing and credentialing rules so that people who learned a marketable skill in the military can get jobs in the private sector without extensive retraining.

Medics and truck drivers are examples of skills learned by people in the military that do not automatically lead to civilian employment, because of licensing rules vary by state and jurisdiction.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman and chief sponsor of bill HR 2433, said the idea is to make veterans — especially those who have been unemployed for long periods and have exhausted GI Bill education benefits — better able to qualify for available jobs.
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