Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden at a Joining Forces nurses event (Lawrence Jackson/Official photo)
Michelle Obama is on the road marking the first anniversary of her "Joining Forces" initiative to help veterans find jobs. The unemployment rate among young veterans has been persistently high, and, as Meteor Blades has written, "getting more veterans into employment is ultimately about putting the nation back to work."
Short of an employment turnaround in the nation as a whole, though, the Joining Forces program attempts to recruit private-sector employers to hire veterans and military spouses and to mitigate some of the challenges military families face in finding work. At an event in Shreveport, Louisiana, Michelle Obama touted some of the program's successes:
...the truth is, is that when we started to plan this event a couple of months ago, we had planned on announcing the 50,000th hire. That’s what this was going to be. ... but by the end of March we had already hit that mark. And then a week later, we added 5,000 more. And by April, another 3,000.
So today, I couldn’t be more excited to announce that America’s businesses have hired 60,000 veterans and military spouses in the past year.
She also cited commitments for the future:
And just last week, a group of 11 companies said that they would devote 15,000 portable, flexible jobs to military spouses and veterans. More than 1,600 companies — from Sears and Siemens, to NBC and Disney, to Honeywell and Snap-On Tools — they’ve all joined this effort. Everyone is stepping up. And in total, they’ve committed to hiring at least 160,000 veterans and military spouses in the coming years. And that’s above and beyond the 60,000 that we’re talking about here today. That’s on top of it.
The unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans has been consistently higher than for the population as a whole; however, in recent months it has been on a downward trajectory, despite a
rebound in March.