Veterans’ complaints, lawsuits on the rise

March 14, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

The Record

HACKENSACK, N.J.

Federal law requires employers to rehire their workers in the National Guard or Reserves who are called to active duty.

But since the economy went sour two years ago, the number of complaints and lawsuits filed against employers for violations of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act has gone through the roof.

The law doesn’t protect a guardsman whose employer goes out of business or whose position is eliminated, but it does prevent his boss from giving his job to someone else.

In 2008 and 2009, some 2,863 USERRA complaints were filed with the Department of Labor — or 11.5 for every 1,000 soldiers who were deactivated during those two years. Five years ago, the rate was seven per 1,000.

The Department of Justice, which takes the most serious of those cases to federal court, filed 22 lawsuits in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, double the number it brought the year before.

And attorneys who specialize in USERRA cases say the official numbers don’t begin to paint the full picture.

“From 2001 to 2004, most of the violations of USERRA were nonintentional,” said Matthew Tully, a lawyer based in Albany, N.Y.

Not anymore.

“We’ve had clients who were fired and told, ‘Contact our law firm; we’ll work out a severance package,’” said Tully, himself a major in the New York Army National Guard. “We’ve handled 100 to 150 cases involving illegal terminations in the last 18 months. Before 2007, you could count the number of cases that involved firing on one hand.”