MIA 3: VEVRAA
The 3rd MIA meeting, on September 5, 2024, was focused on veteran employment protections.
AI Generated transcript
This is our third conversation I'm gonna mute y'all um all right bye um the there's our third meeting the first one was kind of an overview second one was hate crimes where we got some good things going on I got a call from Tim uh earlier Eric uh and this one is going to be on employment and employment discrimination how it intersects with military folks um so just like last time we'll do 20 minutes 20 minutes 20 minutes there's not very many of us so leave lots of time for discussion um but the the bulk of it I'm going to be talking about um VRA usera is actually pretty good law seems to work um doesn't protect veterans it protects service members anybody was an active contract um and then going to talk about some of the the examples or evidence of how we can see when things aren't quite working so I said rampant discrimination but I don't know is the first word that came to mind and then we'll talk uh we'll have our our discussion at the end um
um so the close this out I cannot introductions uh Tim I don't remember if you were there but uh Eric and Tim if you let me know if you've had any experience or anecdotal interactions around employment discrimination harassment or bias um and then I'll I'll kind of close this out with with my own experience and we'll get started um from the standpoint of a um of a case worker I have handle cases that they that have dealt with that uh where a person that worked for an agency was not receiving the um benefits that they were supposed to based off being or the consideration they were supposed to get based off of being a veteran um in that regard it was um um um you're supposed to get a special consideration being a veteran and he wasn't getting that special consideration um then uh there was another one where uh he was being placed because of he was a veteran based off being a veteran he had a specific kind of disability and they were putting him into a role based off of not considering his disability with the hopes that they could fire him later um and which can't happen that was totally they weren't supposed to be doing that so I fact those those are two that come to mind but if I went through I've probably had five or six cases of that
nature Tim you have any input or thoughts or well Mine mine's a little older um I served from 84 to 87 we were still in the shadow of Vietnam um I was an Army medic and when I came back here I also got my Maryland State EMT I was stationed at Fort me Maryland I worked on the post ambulance uh fort fort me Maryland uh I came out with a letter of recommendation Etc and when I came out to California of course there's no reciprocity at that time um but what I ran into um was just a lot of we don't care about your military experience we don't care that you were in the army um we don't you know just a whole bunch of of that and again um this was still we were in like I say the shadow of Vietnam um things didn't change until start changing until Desert Shield Desert Storm and then of course it uh with 911 it it blew up um but yeah there there were things like that it it wasn't unusual shall I say okay Nick uh I see you just joined us we're just talking about any experiences we've had as veterans or experiences we've heard of that um that might give us some insight into employment discrimination or bias did you have anything you wanted to contribute I see that you're muted
though hello um just checking in at the moment don't have any thing to say at the moment but just checking in okay awesome thanks Nick um as promised um so this is what set it off for me is employment discrimination just as quickly as I can make it I was on track to be an academic I just wanted to teach at some sleepy college town and read books and think about God and uh I had my first master's degree uh uh from duke um it's a really interesting experience I went there wanting to study something and I didn't get the chance to because there was a clear need to be thinking about something else and I was constantly being sought out for advice by shared faculty members about how to understand and interact with veterans because I was older than most of the students and I'd kind of been through the ringer um I got a second degree and came back and uh I got a a TA contract and I mean it's an atwi State it's you know that's all fine in Dandy um but I had several years of teaching experience before I began working at Duke as an employee and something clicked for me when I found out I was going to become a dad and um a lot of the like thousand tiny paper cuts I'm sure many of most of y'all can kind of uh can affirm like you can take it like that's what I was trained to do uh you know when I when my back first went out when I was 31 my now wife had to like tell me Logan this isn't normal let's go to the emergency room so we went to the VA and she saw how much it sucked and then she was like Oh I thought you were always just overplaying how bad it is I'm like no it really sucks um but when I when I found out I'd become a father um it wasn't just another consenting adult that I had responsibilities for it was a a soon to be born child so how it played out for me was I got this weird ta section I was given an evening section which we never had before uh at Duke and I was given half the number of students as all the other preceptors and some of the other Tas we call them preceptors some of them had two section so it made sense to me like why would why why wouldn't you just make sure all the sections have equal numbers then I thought well you know nobody wants to work at night and so I asked my students like you know on the first day of class I'm like what appeals to you for uh for night class and most of them said I didn't choose this they just put me here so that was all fine um but then I found out I was going to be a dad and the timing of the section was at when I would be doing bedtime and so I didn't want to talk to the person who hired me because she had a a history with my wife and I just didn't like her either she just I just didn't trust her and so I did what I thought I was supposed to do you find the EEOC representative that was the Divinity Dean at the time so I I set up a meeting with the Divinity School Dean uh just to say look I want to keep working here but I can't work in evening section and the person who hired me we have a history of and I don't think she would treat me fairly so I had this meeting then I got an email saying hey everybody's got to do this implicit bias training it happened to be on the same day I was supposed to meet with my Dean February 29th 2016 and so I go to this implicit bias training in my mind knowing I'm about to talk to the dean about like how do I keep working here without you know getting replaced as a squeaky week and it was in that implicit bias training where I realized all the stuff that I just kind of was shrugging off as a student and was seeing as an employee as well that the name for that or you know I was I was just kind of shrugging it off because it just must suck to be a veteran like I get it and I realized like no that's not supposed to be how it works this is what by you know uh anti-bias stuff is for you know so that you're not looked at in class as though you've got one veteran told me he said sometimes the other students look at me like I've got stupid stamped across my forehead and all they know about me is that i' served and I deployed so um I met with my Dean it was a really good conversation and it's very kind of candid and up front I wasn't had no reason to be like Angry it was just like I I need to take my career path seriously because I have no mentors there were no military veterans on faculty at Duke at my school I had nobody who was walking me through how to be a seminarian or uh a religion scholar and I had somebody who had control over my job that I didn't trust and could use my military service as an excuse to take away a contract so um the dean encouraged me to talk to another vet the only vet she knew at the Divinity School who happened to be a fundraiser and who had had been a commander in the Navy I don't know how high he was I think it was like an ' 06 and this other vet as a fundraiser you know you got to make people happy you're all you always got a smile on your face and I told them all this stuff that had gone on when I was a student including learning that a student veteran had taken their own life two years before I had gotten there and what Duke senior vice presidents were saying they were going to do to change orientation and change the culture at Duke because of this suicide by the time I gotten there in 2010 still didn't happen um and the veteran this guy um it was it was not his experience he was he had a really good experience at Duke he loved his job he loved his peers he also wasn't enlisted and uh he was in a combat MOS so there were these tiny little distinctions that I began seeing as like oh these are bigger than I realized and at the end of our meeting I said I had this kind of litany of things that I and other veterans had brought up when I was a student and the the president of the SVA chapter at Duke um and at the end of the meeting I said you know I just want to help I want this place to be a better place for other veterans I'm I'm already working here like um and he said something to which my response was like I'm tired and angry and he didn't and I said something like you know if if after hearing all this stuff you aren't angry too like I don't know what we are gonna do because we're not gonna nothing's going to change and so he then tried to take stuff into his own hands um and things just kind of fell apart the person who hired me found out I was asking questions I didn't get offered a second contract I blew the whistle the wagon circled and inside six months I started two Federal investigations at Duke and I was basically I'd been told by one of my faculty mentors you'll be blacklisted if you pursue this sure enough I was a stay-at home dad from next eight years so this is really close to my experience it's very complicated another veteran in California who's a practicing attorney the way that vevra is written um well I'll talk about usera really quickly usera is a law that seems to be working the United Services and employment and re-employment Rights Act was passed in 1994 title 38 section 4301 and onward um it protects the civilian employment of active and Reserve Personnel when they are activated and also clarifies existing law improved enforcement mechanisms and added federal employees uh as being eligible to receive protection under usera um and to this day that's it's it's certainly not perfect but there are several cases of usera actions that have benefited veterans um I see your hand has raised him just one moment um I I forgot to put in the Amendments well I wanted to make sure that I know usera exists with GI Justice and Mia I'm focusing on the laws that we need that we that are poorly written don't exist or aren't enforced you Sarah I just want to put on the table like I know it's there but it doesn't protect veterans um I think it protects almost all service members if you have a contract uh Tim did you have a comment or a question a comment on on you Sarah and how it does not work I had a friend of mine I served with Mark ji he was staff sergeant biomedical equipment repair specialist uh he and I got out about the same time he went into the uh reserve unit in Rena Ohio as a there's a Hos combat support Hospital there as their biomedical equipment repair andco um he was deployed Desert Shield Desert Storm spent best part of a year over there during the whole time um he had a civilian job as a biomedical equipment repair technician with a company that contracted with hospitals he's in Ohio that was where he lived uh when he got back from his service time they said well yeah you can still work for it in Michigan so he had to because someone has your contract that you had before so we will offer you a contract so he had to move his family to Michigan for I think it was about five years until they could move back to Ohio where he and his wife were from so it again it's um yes they reemployed him but not at his previous position and not at his the um previous I believe they call it tier but you know your experience level uh pay thing yeah and yeah that's what it's supposed to protect people from is undo hardship related to your military service um a service member is actually a distinct legal entity in the United States because if you're a service member if you have a contractor an MSO you're subject to the GI uh USM uh good Lord UCMJ first and foremost then everything else after vice versa if someone brings an action against you in court that's why the SC is there it's going to have to wait until you're you you're able to take care of the stuff and this is Eric it goes back to like the Readiness Factor um if you if you know that your employment is going to be changed because you're serving our country that creates an undue hardship and this is what it's supposed to protect against um so vev long name is the Vietnam era veterans Rehabilitation and assistance act initially passed in 1972 um in 1972 it was called maybe just Vera and I have I have a UR I have a his a legislative history of vevra on GI Justice I think it's it's under the blog uh yeah it's under the blog and I think that's the title legislative history of VRA um it wasn't called VRA VRA is the name in 1974 when they added affirmative action you can see I've I've highlighted it here um so there are three there's actually four parts of the law you can see them here the one I've excluded I'll talk really briefly about in a moment and that's about reporting uh but essentially the way the law is written it leaves a lot of things out and I haven't I haven't read this closely in some time but I was about to mention this lawyer in California um Daniel Mendelson he did he did some kind of council work for Disney in California and he discovered or he had suspected that either they weren't doing their Veterans Preference hiring or possibly and I don't remember how he came across VRA but like maybe they were they were in violation and his experience of it is that you know and and he does contract law the actual contract between Disney and the the dod which is I I don't know what it involves I I think it might be licensing Disney material to show overseas or something to that nature um all that the law requires is right here that there's a clause in there that that suggests the contractor will take affirmative action and it goes on it you can uh file complaint and uh the Department of Labor uh will enforce the law or is supposed to even though it's title 38 which is all Veterans Affairs stuff this goes over to labor so there's a weird overlap between do and VA at the federal level that always was confusing for like committees and committee staff members but the only standard they create was prompt investigation I'll get into how that's a problem in a moment um and then finally uh I want to say in the '90s yeah I think it was in the 90s section c was added uh so that the number of complaints the actions and the resolutions would be tracked and reported to Congress and so those three parts I'll talk about individually in a moment um but one of the parts that I excluded from here has to do with eligibility so before we even get into what the law does or doesn't do we're actually excluding including some of the members of this community from this protection so if you think employment discrimination well you can you can discriminate against some of this community but not all of them so in one of the subsections under paragraph a a covered veteran quote unquote has to be disabled they have to have a campaign badge or a service medal and they have to have been separated within three years or I should say or one of these three4 um and there is certainly a Time when you would get a service medal but not a campaign medal if you served during uh the global war in Terror but you didn't uh get deployed you have a service medal but not a campaign medal um but what that does is it creates unprotected veterans vulnerable Veterans for whom it is fully legal to discriminate against them in their employment that includes any peacetime veteran who does not have a disability and it's hard to track the numbers because you know they overlap but when I did some uh uh research in 2016 there were 4.5 million ptime veterans in 2016 um now the way it's worded it just says has a disability and it doesn't specify whether that qualification is under Ada or if in fact they have to be service connected through the veterans benefits and health administration so it's it's vague but that's somewhere between 15 and 20% of the veteran Community it's completely legal and lawful to discriminate against them in employment it's also protects employers if you do not have a contract or if your contract is less than $100,000 a year you do not fall into the jurisdiction of vevra great example here in Oregon at uh Lin Benton Community College last year I put it in uh uh an application to be included in the adjunct pool at twoyear school I've got two master's degrees I'm overqualified but I never got a call back I never I I sent several emails to department heads never heard back so I contacted the state Bureau of Labor and Industry and they said you should probably file a complaint it sounds like they're in violation of the state level Veterans Preference stuff now I also asked because I always want to know what bases I can run I tried to find out if in fact LBCC was a federal contractor they weren't sure I talked to HR I can't remember their name HR didn't know they had to actually ask their councel whether or not they're contractors and I double checked they are not federal contractors I am not protected by vevra at LBCC so that's an example they they uh so there's a a a database that lists all the federal contractors how much money they get each year their address Etc and there's some contracts that are like five or $6,000 and they're big you know they're big manufactur facturers there's one like a cement company out here does a lot of business with the Department of State or something or no agriculture that's a federal contract but if it's less than 100,000 those employees at that cement factory would not be protected under vev um so moving into the kind of meat and potatoes of the act vevra as you saw in section A it talks about affirmative action it really only requires some language and a contract but what does affirmative action look like it's coming under Fire recently the Supreme Court ruled against it in education um I think most Americans are opposed to affirmative action my own understanding of it as you know uh a norm core Sith head you know white guy um is that affirmative action and it came out of 1957 with Eisenhower and Kennedy they talked about taking not just enforcing protecting steps but actually affirmative action to attract to recruit TR uh retain and promote marginalized communities in the interest of diversity in the interest of economic Prosperity Etc in 57 and 1960 we created the EEOC uh it was initially under Eisenhower is called something else Kennedy finally got it in uh in uh the Civil Rights Act 1960 and this is where most affirmative action cases go the employment the Equal Employment and opportunity commission it's been doing its thing for I don't know how long since probably 60 I think before it was this the president's committee on civil rights or something like that um but if you go to the eeoc's website and you look up What complaints what laws what classes and characteristics they protect you'll notice it does not list veteran status or military status EEOC is under no legal obligation to protect veterans I've double checked this I've triple checked this they do not protect veterans uh Housing and Urban Development fair housing and equal opportunity office also does not protect veterans unless it's positively ascribed in law an institution an agency typically is not going to protect military vetan status including EEOC that will come up again later when we talk about when some VRA cases do get enforced and how that's creating a problem um affirmative action is also about creating diversity through um not incentives and I don't I don't even know if it's really enforcement what the hope is is that populations within a workplace represent the relative population outside the workplace place and that's not always the same as population population if anybody knows V you'll know that the Department of Labor establishes what they call a benchmark a hiring Benchmark now in 2020 in Oregon 6.1% of veterans or 6.1% of oregonians are veteran which you can see under column D and this spreadsheet is uh something I recreated based off of this um I don't know if you can see my screen or my my face but the OSU equal opportunity and access office um they've provided this fun little table uh because part of verra requires employers to track who they hire into what tier of employment how many are retained how many are new hires so the data is there and the data is sometimes scary and gross so for example in Oregon 6.1% of residents are veteran the hiring Benchmark is actually 5.7% because it's set at the national level now I drilled into these numbers based off of their own reporting and I have the the last column just is too wide but all the totals so I took the the total number of veterans in the academic tier in the professional tier tier and in the classified tier and I I figured out what percentage of the total academic professional classified employees were veterans and you'll see here academic faculty at OSU there's 1% there's 23 veterans and there's something like 6,000 6,000 total employees I should bring it back or I I could pull it up um at the mid tier so there's there's 2300 academic faculty at OSU 23 of them are veterans that's 1% they're below the hiring Benchmark there are fewer veterans employed at OSU than are qualified probably in the workplace in the mid tier it bumps up to 3.4% representation there's 86 veterans in the mid tier for about 2500 total employees and then finally at the very bottom where you get like maintenance clerical administrative stuff a lot of it is entry level all of a sudden you see we have 3.6% of that tier is made up of veterans so if I'm I've talked to OSU like I want to work there I had a I had a career in Academia before I became a father and after I filed some federal investigations but looking at these numbers it's an uphill battle for me to be recognized for my qualifications and be placed accordingly part of that is because I haven't gotten the PHD but they have plenty of instructors who teach undergrads who assist you know full professors but there's only 1% of representation there at the bottom just because I was curious I looked at how many total employees across tiers and what that percentage of is in their uh 6,300 employees so 2.6 of the entire Workforce is a veteran that means were less than half utilized there should be something like three 320 right there's 164 that is only better than the representation for people with disabilities above that we have Hispanic representation um they're they're less than half as well and an over represented we have Native American and Alaskan Indians which makes sense it's a Pacific Northwest um and the other big one is is um uh people are identifying as Asian so I'm not trying to compare different communities I want to know what their affirmative action plan has accomplish and for me it's not accomplishing much it's it's loading us at the bottom um and so data like this helps us understand that there might be a problem but it doesn't always get us to what the problem is or how to correct it how to get more veterans on campus um and because that's local I wanted to kind of throw that out there as an example the next section I want to talk about is uh promptly investigates uh this is the only standard that is measurable and I say that because vevra has been taken to court a handful of times the highest one uh was Greer V Chow it made it to the eth circuit whoopsies let me see if I can go back I skipped too far ahead um the the law has been challenged or its enforcement has been challenged a number of times most notably by uh Donald Greer in 2007 and I read his stuff he also he filed a couple of other complaints he doesn't strike me as the most reliable narrator um just like you know like Jeffrey Sarver and Blaster one anyway um he's not the greatest guy but like that doesn't make it okay to write bad laws to expose veterans to discrimination um in 2007 reer takes the Secretary of Labor to court saying look they didn't investigate and Sandra de o Conor quoting another vevra Case by a judge uh I can't remember the first name of Kennedy she quoted another case in order to say the investigation like the final decision to enforce is within the agency's discretion and she went on this other judge that she's quoting also said it makes vevra no law at all because promptly investigates is not a meaningful standard uh their their own compliance manual that do calls for resolution within 180 days um my VRA complaint took about 250 the average when I went in foad the last 20 years of data the average was well over a year and a half and I mean they could say it's prompt if they don't have enough staff they don't have enough money that's as prompt as they can go right it's not meaningful standard and so because there's no standard and it wasn't written with the same kind of attention to detail I guess as other laws like Civil Rights Act 1964 we get short trift right um but this is a this is the highest case I can find Donald Greer V Chow Secretary of Labor in in 2007 but I mean it basically means and I wanted to I included her quote because it made me think if the justice department say decided that they didn't want to act on uh racial hatred and bias in employment under this rationale the doj could just decide it's entirely within their realm of discretion to only enforce hate crimes against white people or something I don't know I was really struck that a former Supreme Court justice has said they they can do whatever they want they can piss in a bucket and call it lemonade because that that's what they can do and as we'll see in a moment that is kind of what's going on finally this complaints paragraph uh it just says you can complain and a Secretary of Labor has to investigate and then it talks about you know the some of the definitions and stuff so I looked up I started you know I'm a state- home Dad I got plenty of time a lot of stuff I can do on my phone and so a couple of years ago I looked up how many complaints were being processed by do and remember I saw that the law is clear number uh actions and resolution right three things and when I first saw in 2018 was just that what you see on the screen one line containing the number of complaints 132 I was like okay well that doesn't seem right uh there at least needs to be some more information I checked 2019 that is the only line they had in 2019 this annual report 179 complaints now one thing to know is that the enforcement agency is not the reporting agency underneath do are two agencies one the enforcement agency is the office of federal contracts and compliance program they enforce or they I'll use the scare quotes enforce vets veterans employment and training services they do the report and vets and ofccp don't always talk and when I foed I foed ofc CP and do even has a page on their own website of the enforcement data that does not match any of this and I'll I'll show it I'll show it in a second and I'm laughing because I don't want to cry or throw my computer across the room 2019 I was like wait a minute you guys got to get your [ __ ] together I I talked to a guy named Robert Shepard and then I talked with his boss torren something torren I think torren is still there and I I let them have it I I brought the receipts I showed them the PDF on their own website I showed them the law I linked it to.gov you know whatever and they tried to Gaslight me they tried to ignore me and then I went to Mike Levan who at the time was uh on the subcommittee or he was on HVAC um and I was in his district when I was living in California the year before last and I made a big stink and 2020 don't you know all of a sudden they magically publish this table and it has all these complaint outcomes there's the first time it appeared uh maybe since the the reporting requirement was written in July I don't know and it has here a total of 194 complaints and so it's gone up but when you start looking at their own information it leaves a lot of questions so in 2020 most of their complaints 40% of them were either closed without without stating why or they referred to the EEOC which we all know does not protect veterans so 80% of their own complaints they're saying we brushed them off to another agency or we're not going to tell you why we closed them that feels suspicious to me so I kept pressing them in 2021 um nothing appeared I don't know why it was just crickets there was no line there was no table there was nothing and that's that's when I kind of U the pressure on Levan um and Bobby Scott I think was the do or he was the labor committee chairman at the time and he was a veteran still I never heard back from his office 2021 there was nothing 2022 they have this table and now the number's gone down to 10 complaints uh that's how many they closed and of those they oh they referred again 40% to the EEOC which is an agency that does not protect veterans um 42 of them they said it wasn't their jurisdiction and then two of them they provided a right to sue which is essentially we're not going to help you but you can sue them if you do it within I think it's 90 days or I don't know there's some limit but they according to this they did not have a single finding of Merit in 2022 there was not a single complaint from a veteran that was legitimate in their eyes fast forward to 2023 the most recent one I just saw this stuff last night because I had to get the screenshots they received 400 complaints that's an increase of almost
400% then of I guess they all they received 414 but they only investigated 20 I think they closed with no violations the vast majority of them two of them they found violations in 2023 and that again statistically that's not that's that is statistically significant that's saying 80% of the veterans that they invest the claims that they investigated based on a veterans complaint were without Merit they're all just a bunch of malingerers pro profile Queens broke dicks I don't really believe that but I'm not sure what those numbers say other than we don't believe veterans yeah go ahead
Eric is there any way to find out those two uh that were um verified what they were for and uh the other ones is it possible to get that kind of data like what did they turn say wasn't or what did they say was the Foya is the most reliable I'm going to try and open so I didn't include my I'm a little crazy uh I Foya 20 years of data and sorted it into you know vets not vets let me see if I can find it um yeah here it is let me see if I'm sharing this no no no stop sharing okay share another thingy is that it yeah I think that's it okay so yall see in a Google sheet yep so this is600 cases between 2000 and 2020 actually yeah this is it so I foyer it um and none of the numbers that I've just quoted to you that are being reported to Congress I could not match any of them up because each year there was yeah I I even had some charts and I Eric I can share this with you if you want it's been a while since I've really refined it but like data's data is just data but the stories that data tell us is important so one of the charts that I'll show you again here in this 20 year that that's different I've updated these guys here from 2000 to 2020 ofccp Do's enforcement agency received more complaints from veterans than any other complaintant that they protect in at same time veterans and VRA received the fewest findings of Merit so we are the largest group of complainants to the do and the do is coming back to us saying disproportionately we don't believe you that I don't know you're making this up or maybe they're smart and they say and they look into it and they're like look there's no law that has been violated bevra is not that kind of law um and there's nothing we can do because you know what are we going to do tell them that they did something wrong when there's nothing in law so to your question Eric yes there's a way I can foyer this stuff or I can look up on the data enforcement enforcement data page to see in 2023 how many V complaints there were of those how many were by veterans because it it doesn't always overlap for some reason and then it will have the respondent's name the the person the uh the the defendant essentially so we can get that data it wouldn't be much time and that's one of my like pet projects was to um to look that stuff up and try and you know kind of report it out as though I were a little journalist or something I'm I'm not I don't have any training but like I know how stories work and I know how to ask people what's going on um but here's the up ated data with a link to the actual Foya data set um they've anytime they get foas they store it and I imagine mine is one of them but that was this is what my data that I got from Foya suggests and everything they're reporting to Congress is convoluted and unverifiable at least as far as I can tell um and so that kind of leaves us in this position of like it's a crappy law an agency is not even enfor forcing the crappy law and it's something that uh one of the things that is troubling is that I found some reports that suggest peacetime non-disabled veterans are at greater risk of unemployment and yet they're excluded from employment discrimination protections so at the very top we have to rewrite vevra we have to start from the the bottom or the the from scratch and create clear enforcement standards remove eligibility requirements just like removing the sunsetting of hate crimes after what is it 5 years after discharge or separation the labor department needs to abide by the 14th Amendment and provide equal protection they need to do a better job of investigating um and then also track and report that data accurately to Congress and make it a matter of public concern I've asked repeatedly uh Levan and Tron Tron was on labor for a while um look have a hearing get it on C-Span so at least it makes it forces the the conversation to the to the four but I I couldn't succeed because it always happened that the person I was in touch with their party was losing power something something um and then finally state and local they frequently have their own like Oregon has from all I can tell a decent uh Veterans Preference but they're not being it's not being enforced I mean the example I used earlier um they they're they wouldn't give me just a verbal a verbal affirmation that they followed the process because I could prove to them that they were being honest or not if they made any hires in the entire year that my application was active they would have been required to interview me if they made a single hire of an adjunct faculty they would have been in violation because any anytime you hire you're supposed to also at least interview a veteran Under Oregon state law um and so typically state enforcement measures and state protections are better it doesn't mean they're more enforced or more well known but I think that those are the kind of challenges that we face in our next steps um that went longer than I thought I I apologize we have about 10 minutes for uh Q&A and discussion um and as just as before I'm happy to put this on YouTube separately from my own little like thing but um Tim and Nick and Eric if you have anything thoughts questions concerns I'm happy to host a conversation about it
