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Subscribe to RSSAs the war in Afghanistan winds down, the impact on the nation’s employment picture goes beyond veterans returning home who are looking for work.
There are thousands of civilian jobs related to the war effort, and cutbacks in defense spending have already led to reductions in these defense-related jobs, including direct government positions or those with defense contractors. The loss of these jobs isn’t good news for the still-dim employment picture.
“It will create a greater supply of workers and create more pain overall for the U.S. work force,” said Gautam Godhwani, CEO of jobs website SimplyHired.com.
For May, the number of openings for defense-related jobs across the Web, including job boards and company jobs sites, declined by 4.2 percent compared to the previous month, according to SimplyHired.com research. And unless Congress acts to curb some of the projected defense cutbacks, he added, things will only get worse next year.
Indeed, Boeing officials recently warned that any further cutbacks to defense spending could devastate the defense industry and lead to thousands of jobs lost.
The decline in defense and aerospace employment has already begun. Last year, contractors shed nearly 35,000 jobs, and through May nearly 11,000 more have already disappeared, according to a report from Challenger Gray & Christmas released this week.
There has also been a significant downsizing of civilian workers at the Department of Defense, which saw its work force drop to 790,000 from more than 800,00 in fiscal year 2011, stated a report from the department's comptroller.
And the number is expected to drop further. A story in FederalTimes.com from December reported that in the next decade the Department of Defense’s civilian work force will plummet by 20 percent to 630,000, “the smallest since the Defense Department's creation in 1947.”
The combination of the war winding down, vets returning to the work force, cutbacks in defense-related industries and the inevitable reductions by their suppliers, Godhwani said, all add up to a recipe for fewer job opportunities.
But, he maintained, some states and occupations will benefit from the influx of more civilian workers with defense-related skills.
For example, in cities such as Detroit and Las Vegas, the number of workers for each job opening is about five to one, compared to Washington, D.C., and Boston where there are one or two individuals for every job, Godhwani said.
Also, he added, workers with specialized skills in defense-related industries, including technology and engineering, could be hired by employers who are having difficulty filling jobs.
Among defense-related occupations, all of the top 10 have been declining since 2009 and are expected to decrease even further through 2015, according to a 2011 Secretary of Defense report titled “Defense-Related Employment of Skilled Labor.” These occupations include business and financial, record-keeping clerks, construction trades, maintenance and computer specialists.
Even if some of these workers are able to fill a talent gap in the civilian work force, overall it’s going to be tough to add more jobless individuals to the long lines of the nation's under- and unemployed.
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The money made from all things involved with
repair and improving America's infrastructure will
be spent into the economy and will be paid as
tax revenue and into social security and Medicaid.
Some of you harp on that as spending our way to
prosperity or out of the recession. However, we can not
simply bomb our way out of recession either!
We could just put these returning vets to work rebuilding our infrastructure. Oh, that's right. In any previous GOP administration, we would already be doing that, but since it's Obama's plan, the teabag party is against it.
Obama doesn't have a plan, only talking points.
Eisenhower warned us of the military-industrial complex and he was a retired general.
George Carlin told that that we were a warlike people-we like war.
Put welfare recipients to work on the infrastructure for the free-bees {great depression}let them earn their keep!Make cuts in all gov. spending and downsize our government in general! Why did the fed gov have to increase in size 60% in the last 3 years? And now its even more dysfunctional as ever! Common sense has left the arena and greed has replaced it!If the average citizen must make cuts ,then all government employees,budgets and firms should follow suit!
We are not back in the 1930s. Those "pick-and-shovel" type jobs no longer exist. Infrastructure maintenance is the job of city and state government. They can borrow money just as just as low interest rates with Muni Bonds as the federal government and are not likely to be building "bridges to nowhere" or idiotic high speed rail projects.
While I feel for these people, nobody gave a hoot about all the NASA space workers and subcontractors that lost their jobs. Remember? They shut down the whole shuttle program. If you think the development of the next manned space flight employs the same amount of people, you'd be very wrong. If you belong to the Tea Party, you should be very happy about the cuts. If not, our returning soldiers come first. After all, they were the ones who risked everything to go fight in a war that didn't need to be fought at all. The bad guys were in Pakistan.
This is the effect of an economy based solely and perpetually on trash and war.
If Congress would adhere to the Constitution, the Army, Air Force and Coast Guard would be disbanded along with the Defense Department and the Pentagon, close all overseas and domestic bases they populate. That would reduce this year's annual deficit from the expected $1.5 trillion down to $178.9 billion, the cost of maintaining the Navy and Marine Corps.(1) Add in Veterans pensions and Veterans Administration costs including monthly benefits for medical care and that number comes out to $303.50 billion annually. That would be a savings of nearly $696.5 and $1 trillion off the U.S. annual deficit alone.
Article 1, Section 8: The Congress shall have power To:
Clause 12: raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term longer than two years.
Clause 13: provide and maintain a navy;
Clause 15: provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
Who are the militia? The militia referred to in the 2nd Amendment, Clauses 15 & 16 of the U.S. Constitution necessary to defend these United States from invasions only, not to invade and occupy foreign sovereign nations for the economic benefit of domestic corporations, is to be raised from both the organized and unorganized Militia's as defined in US Code: Title 10: Subtitle A: Part I: Chapter 13 : Section 311-313. Militia: composition and classes.
(1) The classes of the militia are:
(a) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard
(b) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
(1).
With unemployment rates at all time highs for veterans there needs to be different solutions in place. Current job boards don't do veterans justice. Firstly, if an employer is interested in hiring a veteran they simply check a box in their candidate criteria. What does this do? Simply said, it make veterans get lost in the shuffle and 8/10 times their resumes get put to the side because recruiters and hiring managers don't understand how to read their resumes, they may not be to par or veterans dont have previous civilian work experience. This puts veterans at a total disadvantage. <a href="">HirePurpose</a> is changing that by getting exclusive jobs from employers that knowingly post their jobs on this site to find talented veterans. This shifts the thought process of the recruiter as they know they are only getting veterans. The added benefit of HirePurpo.se is that the veteran gets matched to the perfect job based on an assessment that they take and a questionnaire that the employer takes. This process reduces many of the factors that leave veterans high and dry on other sites..