Today the Veterans Benefits Administration published some very good news. Here’s the message:
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Colleagues and Fellow Veterans,
As with the first Friday of each month, the BLS employment statistics were released today. Attached is our monthly ‘cheat sheet’ for your use and information. The national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.0% and the Veteranunemployment numbers decreased from 3.9 to 3.6%.
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
VA Core Values: Integrity, Commitment, Advocacy, Respect, Excellence (“I CARE”)
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Here at GallantFew, we’ve been closely watching these numbers for more than four years now. Monthly we publish our own interpretation, here’s our chart, click it to see full-size. Green lines and bars are Gulf War era II (post-9/11). Blue is non-veteran, red is all veteran, purple is Desert Storm era. You’ll notice the female post 9/11 line takes a sharp upturn, indicating a worse condition. Keep in mind here these are small numbers in the Department of Labor’s sampling and the female veteran chart bounces a lot. Overall we like to look at the trend of the past twelve month, and it’s been a constant decline (meaning good).
This month is the first month since we’ve tracked these figures that the post 9/11 number has dropped below the non-veteran number. There is still a huge gap between the Desert Storm era and the post 9/11 era, with the post 9/11 era being almost twice as likely unemployed.
Let’s hope these trends continue, and thank you for all the hard work of many organizations both public and private that are working hard to help our veterans.
Veteran Unemployment (pdf of our chart)
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