Companies ease the transition for returning troops
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Back from war, members of the National Guard and Reserves find themselves dealing with the transition from the battlefield to the workplace. And Rhode Island companies are forced to fill in the gaps while their employees are away on stateside and overseas deployments.
The work force losses have been felt nationwide, as the country currently relies on the Guard and Reserves for almost half of its available military manpower.
“It always takes some sort of filling in that doesn’t in any way make up for the person we lose,” said Cheryl A. Merchant, president and CEO of Hope Global, a multi-national textile company based in Cumberland.
Three Hope Global employees are currently deployed in active-duty service, Merchant said, and her management team has tried several methods to perform their duties until they return; the company hires temps and consultants; staff take on the missing employees’ responsibilities, sometimes requiring overtime pay.
Hope Global is among about 30 companies in the state that the Rhode Island National Guard says provide benefits above and beyond the requirements of the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), which mandates that employers preserve service members’ jobs while they are deployed.
James C. Satori, vice president of corporate security and loss prevention manager for Citizens Bank, said he was just as nervous as the next soldier in his Army National Guard unit when they deployed to Jacobabad, Afghanistan. But unlike some of his fellow guardsmen, Satori was employed by a company that sustained his work benefits while he served overseas.
“I wasn’t worried at all about my job,” said Satori, 34, a sergeant first-class in the 972nd Military Police Company based in Melrose, Mass. “I knew the bank had nice military benefits.”
Satori’s unit’s first active-duty assignment immediately after Sept. 11 was guarding Logan International Airport in Boston, he said. Nine months later, they deployed to Afghanistan for another nine months.
When Satori returned to work at Citizens in March 2003, “I went right into it just like I never left,” he said. Citizens gave him a week off between the end of his deployment and his first day of work. And while he was serving, the bank kept his employee health insurance in place for his family and made up the difference between his lower military pay and his company salary.
It was a different story for others in Satori’s military unit, many of whom were younger and worked at smaller companies with less to offer returning guardsmen. “A lot of guys didn’t have the benefits that I had,” he said.
Lt. Col. Mathies J. Santos, executive director of the Rhode Island Committee of the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), said he and group volunteers work with more than 235 employers in the state to ensure that they comply with USERRA.
In some cases, Santos said, the ESGR committee members must educate, say, a company with a line supervisor who tells a subordinate that they have to work instead of attending a weekend drill with their Guard or Reserve unit. The company then informs supervisors that USERRA prohibits employers from interfering with workers’ military commitments.
“In general, Rhode Island employers have been really good,” Santos said. “We haven’t had anyone (in the National Guard) who has lost their job.”
In August 2004, Santos said, the Guard launched a system by which to rate Rhode Island companies on how well they treat their employees during military deployments. Ratings rate from one star, for companies who sign a statement in support of the USERRA and their employees in the Guard or Reserves, all the way up to five stars for companies that exceed mandates of the law.
For example, Hope Global, which now has three employees deployed, sends them care packages, in some cases laptops to communicate with loved ones, and the company newsletter to boot.
Small-business owners deal with unique challenges when deployed.
The Rhode Island Committee works with trades people, doctors, dentists to ease some of the difficulties they face.
Santos said the committee, working with the U.S. Small Business Administration, helps business owners devise business plans for coping with their absence and secure short-term loans. The ESGR also sends letters to customers of small businesses, thanking them for, say, continuing to support a dentist who must leave her practice to serve overseas.
Santos named Rhode Island College, Hope Global, Citizens Bank, Cardi’s Furniture and Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island as employers who have earned five-star ratings.
Keith E. Macksoud, a nurse anesthetist for Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, said he was deployed to medical facilities at Ft. Lewis, Wash., from Jan. 5 to April 17.
“I really didn’t have many challenges coming back,” Macksoud, 47, said. “The hospital made it pretty easy.”
One of the hospital’s helpful benefits for employees like Macksoud, he said, was keeping his health insurance policy in place for the first 60 days of his deployment, providing time for his family to learn about military health coverage given to all members of the active military.
Still, Macksoud said his deployment meant supplementing his lower military pay with savings.
And he noted that, because he is an instructor at Memorial, he was unable to teach classes and the hospital had nobody to fill in for him.
Francis Meringolo, vice president of human resources for Memorial Hospital, said it is nearly impossible to recruit staff to fill in for highly specialized employees like Macksoud. In most cases, he said, the hospital uses the services of traveling nurses to make up for staff temporarily lost to the military.
Meringolo estimated that the hospital employs as many as 20 members of the Guard and Reserves, two or three of which are currently deployed overseas. “It does create a big whole in an area that is difficult to recruit for.”
